Objective evaluation of naturalness, contrast, and colorfulness of tone-mapped images

International audienceThe main obstacle preventing High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging from becoming standard in image and video processing industry is the challenge of displaying the content. The prices of HDR screens are still too high for ordinary customers. During last decade, a lot of effort has been dedicated to finding ways to compress the dynamic range for legacy displays with simultaneous preservation of details in highlights and shadows which cannot be achieved by standard systems. These dynamic range compression techniques are called tone-mapping operators (TMO) and introduce novel distortions such as spatially non-linear distortion of contrast or naturalness corruption. This paper provides an analysis of objective no-reference naturalness, contrast and colorfulness measures in the context of tone-mapped images evaluation. Reliable measures of these features could be further merged together into single overall quality metric. The main goal of the paper is to provide an initial study of the problem and identify the potential candidates for such a combination