Image Attributes and Quality for Evaluation of Tone Mapping Operators

Abstract

The problem of reproducing high dynamic range images on devices with restricted dynamic range has gained a lot of interest in the computer graphics community. There ex-ist various approaches to this issue, which span several re-search areas including computer graphics, image process-ing, color science, physiology, neurology, psychology, etc. These approaches assume a thorough knowledge of both the objective and subjective attributes of an image. However, no comprehensive overview and analysis of such attributes has been published so far. In this paper, we present an overview of image qual-ity attributes of different tone mapping methods. Further-more, we propose a scheme of relationships between these attributes, leading to the definition of an overall image qual-ity measure. We present results of subjective psychophysical tests that we have performed to prove the proposed relation-ship scheme. We also present the evaluation of existing tone mapping methods with regard to these attributes. Our effort is not just useful to get into the tone mapping field or when implementing a tone mapping operator, but it also sets the stage for well-founded quality comparisons between tone mapping operators. By providing good defi-nitions of the different attributes, user-driven or fully auto-matic comparisons are made possible at all. 1