Abstract
Recently, there has been a significant progress in the research and development of the high dynamic range (HDR) video technology and the state-of-the-art video pipelines are able to offer a higher bit depth support to capture, store, encode, and display HDR video content. In this paper, we introduce a novel HDR video compression algorithm, which uses a perceptually uniform color opponent space, a novel perceptual transfer function to encode the dynamic range of the scene, and a novel error minimization scheme for accurate chroma reproduction. The proposed algorithm was objectively and subjectively evaluated against four state-of-the-art algorithms. The objective evaluation was conducted across a set of 39 HDR video sequences, using the latest x265 10-bit video codec along with several perceptual and structural quality assessment metrics at 11 different quality levels. Furthermore, a rating-based subjective evaluation ( $n=40$ ) was conducted with six sequences at two different output bitrates. Results suggest that the proposed algorithm exhibits the lowest coding error amongst the five algorithms evaluated. Additionally, the rate–distortion characteristics suggest that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing state-of-the-art at bitrates ≥ 0.4 bits/pixel.
Highlights
The capability of High Dynamic Range (HDR) video to capture, store and display a much larger magnitude of realworld lighting with floating point precision requires significantly higher storage and transmission costs when compared to Low/Standard Dynamic Range (LDR/SDR) video
We introduce a novel non-backward compatible HDR video compression algorithm which uses the state-ofthe-art perceptually uniform Intensity, Protan and Tritan (IPT) color opponent space [2], a novel perceptual transfer function with an analytical solution and a novel quantization error minimization function (EMF) to nonlinearly encode achromatic and chroma components, respectively
The objective evaluation was conducted using a set of 39 HDR video sequences and the x265 codec [3] at 11 different quality levels where the compression performance of the five algorithms were evaluated against several energy difference, structural and perceptual quality assessment (QA) metrics generating a set of generalized rate-distortion (RD) characteristics
Summary
The capability of High Dynamic Range (HDR) video to capture, store and display a much larger magnitude of realworld lighting with floating point precision requires significantly higher storage and transmission costs when compared to Low/Standard Dynamic Range (LDR/SDR) video. The objective evaluation was conducted using a set of 39 HDR video sequences and the x265 codec [3] (an HEVC [4] implementation) at 11 different quality levels where the compression performance (image reconstruction quality and transmission requirements) of the five algorithms were evaluated against several energy difference, structural and perceptual quality assessment (QA) metrics generating a set of generalized rate-distortion (RD) characteristics (see Section V for details). The primary contributions of this work are; a) a novel non-backward compatible HDR video compression algorithm which uses a combination of IPT color opponent space, a novel non-linear analytical PATF to encode the intensity information and a novel EMF to non-linearly encode the chroma information b) a generic framework (modular structure) to plug-in existing contrast sensitivity based PTFs inside the algorithm to map real-world intensity values to luma and ; c) a comprehensive objective and subjective evaluation of the proposed algorithm against existing state-of-the-art solutions
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