Tone-Mapping Using Perceptual-Quantizer and Image Histogram

A new tone-mapping algorithm is presented for visualization of high dynamic range (HDR) images on low dynamic range (LDR) displays. In the first step, the real-world pixel intensities of the HDR image are transformed to a perceptual domain using the perceptual-quantizer (PQ). This is followed by construction of the histogram of the luminance channel. Tone-mapping curve is generated from the cumulative histogram. It is known that histogram-based tone-mapping approaches can lead to excessive stretching of contrast in highly populated bins, whereas the pixels in sparse bins can suffer from excessive compression of contrast. We handle these issues by restricting the pixel counts in the histogram to remain below a defined limit, determined by a uniform distribution model. The proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, using some well-known metrics that quantify the quality of tone-mapped images, and is found to have the best performance.