Tone mapping to minimize visual sensation distortion considering brightness and local band-limited contrast

Abstract

We propose a tone-mapping algorithm that minimizes the function that represents the visual sensation distortion that occurs after tone mapping. For the function, we consider both brightness and local band-limited contrast to reduce darkening of images that have high dynamic range when they are displayed with conventional contrast-based tone mapping using histogram on devices that have low dynamic range. By exploiting human visual characteristics, we simplify the problem and find a closed-form solution that minimizes the function that represents distortion of visual sensation. In both subjective and objective evaluations, the proposed algorithm achieves a processed image that is most similar to the original image and has the best subjective image quality.