High dynamic range video compression exploiting luminance masking

Yang Zhang, Matteo Naccari, Marta Mrak, Dimitris Agrafiotis, David Bull

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

51 Citations (Scopus)
818 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The Human Visual System (HVS) exhibits nonlinear sensitivity to the distortions introduced by lossy image and video coding. This effect is due to the luminance masking, contrast masking and spatial and temporal frequency masking characteristics of the HVS. This paper proposes a novel perception-based quantization to remove non visible information in High Dynamic Range (HDR) color pixels by exploiting luminance masking so that the performance of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard is improved for HDR content. A prole scaling based on a tone-mapping curve computed for each HDR frame is introduced. The quantization step is then perceptually tuned on a transform unit basis. The proposed method has been integrated into the HEVC reference model for the HEVC Range Extensions (HM-RExt) and its performance was assessed by measuring the bitrate reduction against the HMRExt. The results indicate that, the proposed method achieves significant bitrate savings, up to 42.2%, with an average of 12.8%, compared to HEVC at the same quality (based on HDR-VDP-2 and subjective evaluations).
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)950-964
Number of pages15
JournalIEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
Volume26
Issue number5
Early online date27 Apr 2015
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 May 2016

Keywords

  • High dynamic range video compression
  • HDR imaging
  • perception-based video compression

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  • COMPPACT

    Bull, D. R. (Principal Investigator)

    8/08/128/08/15

    Project: Research

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