Objective quality assessment of tone-mapped videos

With the fast advances in video acquisition, computational imaging, and display technologies, there has been a growing interest in high dynamic range (HDR) videos. Tone mapping operators (TMOs) that convert HDR content to low dynamic range (LDR) ones provide a practically useful solution for the visualization of HDR videos on standard LDR displays, where the user experience highly depends on the performance of the TMOs being used. Without an appropriate perceptual quality measure, different TMOs cannot be compared. Subjective experiments may be a reliable solution, but is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to be embedded into optimization processes. Here we make one of the first attempts to develop an objective quality assessment model for tone-mapped videos that incorporates structural fidelity, statistical naturalness and memory effect. Validation using subject-rated tone-mapped videos show that the proposed method is well-correlated with subjective scores.