Tone Mapping Operator for High Dynamic Range Images Based on Modified iCAM06.

Abstract

This study attempted to solve the problem of conventional standard display devices encountering difficulties in displaying high dynamic range (HDR) images by proposing a modified tone-mapping operator (TMO) based on the image color appearance model (iCAM06). The proposed model, called iCAM06-m, combined iCAM06 and a multi-scale enhancement algorithm to correct the chroma of images by compensating for saturation and hue drift. Subsequently, a subjective evaluation experiment was conducted to assess iCAM06-m considering other three TMOs by rating the tone mapped images. Finally, the objective and subjective evaluation results were compared and analyzed. The results confirmed the better performance of the proposed iCAM06-m. Furthermore, the chroma compensation effectively alleviated the problem of saturation reduction and hue drift in iCAM06 for HDR image tone-mapping. In addition, the introduction of multi-scale decomposition enhanced the image details and sharpness. Thus, the proposed algorithm can overcome the shortcomings of other algorithms and is a good candidate for a general purpose TMO.