HDR Image Compression by Multi-Scale down Sampling of Intensity Levels

Abstract

HDR images are inherently very large in size compared to normal images. Hence, storage and communication overheads of HDR images are expensive to be used in mobile devices. Hence, invariably image compression is adopted for HDR images. In this paper, HDR image compression is achieved by down sampling the intensity levels while maintaining the dynamic range same as that of the original. This aspect retains the edge information of the images almost intact. Spatial down-sampling process is used to reduce the number of intensity samples. Consequently, this operation lowers the bit depth required to store the corresponding index file which in turn results in image compression.