Uniform color space based high dynamic range video compression

Recently, there has been significant progress in the research and development of High Dynamic Range (HDR) video technology and 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, ratedistortion characteristics suggest that the proposed algo- rithm outperforms the existing state-of-the-art at bitrates ≥ 0 . 4 bits/pixel