A nonlocal variational formulation for the improvement of tone mapped images

Abstract

Due to technical limitations, common display devices can only reproduce images having a low range of intensity values (dynamic range). As a consequence, the dynamic range of images encoding real world scenes, which is large, has to be compressed in order for them to be reproduced on a common display, and this technique is called tone mapping. Because there is no ground truth to compare with, evaluation of a tone mapped image has to be done by comparing with the original high dynamic range image. As standard metrics based on pixel-wise comparisons are not suitable for comparing images of different dynamic range, non local perceptual based metrics are commonly used. We propose a general method for optimizing tone mapped images with respect to a given non local metric. In particular, if the metric is perceptual, i.e. it involves perceptual concepts, we provide an adequate minimization strategy. Experiments on a particular perceptual metric tested with different tone mapped images provided by several tone mapping operators validate our approach.