Tone-mapping constitutes a key component within the field of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging. Its importance is manifested in the vast amount of tone-mapping methods that can be found in the literature, which are the result of an active development in the area for more than two decades. Although these can accommodate most requirements for display of HDR images, new challenges arose with the advent of HDR video, calling for additional considerations in the design of tone-mapping operators (TMOs). Today, a range of TMOs exist that do support video material. We are now reaching a point where most camera captured HDR videos can be prepared in high quality without visible artifacts, for the constraints of a standard display device. In this report, we set out to summarize and categorize the research in tone-mapping as of today, distilling the most important trends and characteristics of the tone reproduction pipeline. While this gives a wide overview over the area, we then specifically focus on tone-mapping of HDR video and the problems this medium entails. First, we formulate the major challenges a video TMO needs to address. Then, we provide a description and categorization of each of the existing video TMOs. Finally, by constructing a set of quantitative measures, we evaluate the performance of a number of the operators, in order to give a hint on which can be expected to render the least amount of artifacts. This serves as a comprehensive reference, categorization and comparative assessment of the state-of-the-art in tone-mapping for HDR video.

Eleven tone-mapping operators intended for video processing are analyzed and evaluated with camera-captured and computer-generated high-dynamic-range content. After optimizing the parameters of the operators in a formal experiment, we inspect and rate the artifacts (flickering, ghosting, temporal color consistency) and color rendition problems (brightness, contrast and color saturation) they produce. This allows us to identify major problems and challenges that video tone-mapping needs to address. Then, we compare the tone-mapping results in a pair-wise comparison experiment to identify the operators that, on average, can be expected to perform better than the others and to assess the magnitude of differences between the best performing operators.

Real-time high quality video tone mapping is needed for manyapplications, such as digital viewfinders in cameras, displayalgorithms which adapt to ambient light, in-camera processing,rendering engines for video games and video post-processing. We propose a viable solution for these applications by designing a videotone-mapping operator that controls the visibility of the noise,adapts to display and viewing environment, minimizes contrastdistortions, preserves or enhances image details, and can be run inreal-time on an incoming sequence without any preprocessing. To ourknowledge, no existing solution offers all these features. Our novelcontributions are: a fast procedure for computing local display-adaptivetone-curves which minimize contrast distortions, a fast method for detailenhancement free from ringing artifacts, and an integrated videotone-mapping solution combining all the above features.

While a number of existing high-bit depth video compression methods can potentially encode high dynamic range (HDR) video, few of them provide this capability. In this paper, we investigate techniques for adapting HDR video for this purpose. In a large-scale test on 33 HDR video sequences, we compare 2 video codecs, 4 luminance encoding techniques (transfer functions) and 3 color encoding methods, measuring quality in terms of two objective metrics, PU-MSSIM and HDR-VDP-2. From the results we design an open source HDR video encoder, optimized for the best compression performance given the techniques examined.

Camera sensors can only capture a limited range of luminance simultaneously, and in order to create high dynamic range (HDR) images a set of different exposures are typically combined. In this paper we address the problem of predicting information that have been lost in saturated image areas, in order to enable HDR reconstruction from a single exposure. We show that this problem is well-suited for deep learning algorithms, and propose a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) that is specifically designed taking into account the challenges in predicting HDR values. To train the CNN we gather a large dataset of HDR images, which we augment by simulating sensor saturation for a range of cameras. To further boost robustness, we pre-train the CNN on a simulated HDR dataset created from a subset of the MIT Places database. We demonstrate that our approach can reconstruct high-resolution visually convincing HDR results in a wide range of situations, and that it generalizes well to reconstruction of images captured with arbitrary and low-end cameras that use unknown camera response functions and post-processing. Furthermore, we compare to existing methods for HDR expansion, and show high quality results also for image based lighting. Finally, we evaluate the results in a subjective experiment performed on an HDR display. This shows that the reconstructed HDR images are visually convincing, with large improvements as compared to existing methods.