Real-Time Tone Mapping: A Survey and Cross-Implementation Hardware Benchmark

Abstract

The rising demand for high quality display has ensued active research in high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, which has the potential to replace the standard dynamic range imaging. This is due to HDR's features like accurate reproducibility of a scene with its entire spectrum of visible lighting and color depth. But this capability comes with expensive capture, display, storage and distribution resource requirements. Also, display of HDR images/video content on an ordinary display device with limited dynamic range requires some form of adaptation. Many adaptation algorithms, widely known as tone mapping operators, have been studied and proposed in the last few decades. In this state of the art report, we present a comprehensive survey of 50+ tone mapping algorithms that have been implemented on hardware for acceleration and real-time performance. These algorithms have been adapted or redesigned to make them hardware-friendly. All real-time application poses strict timing constraints which requires time exact processing of the algorithm. This design challenge require novel solution, and in this report we focus on these issues. In this we survey will discuss those tonemap algorithms which have been implemented on GPU [1-10], FPGA [11-41], and ASIC [42-53] in terms of their hardware specifications and performance. Output image quality is an important metric for tonemap algorithms. From our literature survey we found that, various objective quality metrics have been used to demonstrate the functionality of adapting the algorithm on hardware platform. We have compiled and studied all the metrics used in this survey [54-67]. Finally, in this report we demonstrate the link between hardware cost and image quality thereby illustrating the underlying trade-off which will be useful for the research community.