Tone mapping of high dynamic range video for video gaming applications

High Dynamic Range (HDR) technology is regarded as the latest revolution in digital multimedia, as it aims at capturing, distributing and displaying a range of luminance and color values that better correspond to what the human eye can perceive. Inevitably, physical-based rendering in High Dynamic Range (HDR) has recently gained a lot of interest in the video gaming industry. However, the limited availability of commercial HDR displays on one hand and the large installed base of Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) displays on the other imposed the need for techniques to efficiently display HDR content on SDR TVs. Several such techniques, known as Tone-Mapping Operators (TMOs), have been proposed, but all of them are specifically designed for natural content. As such, these TMOs fail to address the unique characteristics of the HDR gaming content, causing loss of details and introducing visual artifacts such as brightness and color inconsistencies. In this thesis, we propose an automated, low complexity and content adaptive video TMO specifically designed for video gaming applications. The proposed method uses the distribution of HDR light information in the perceptual domain and takes advantage of the unique properties of rendered HDR gaming content to calculate a global piece-wise-linear tone-mapping curve to efficiently preserve the global contrast and texture details of the original HDR scene. A unique flickering reduction method is also introduced that eliminates brightness inconsistencies caused by the tone-mapping process while successfully detecting scene changes. Subjective and objective evaluations have shown that our method outperforms existing TMOs, offering better overall visual quality for video gaming content.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofGraduat