Single Layer Progressive Coding for High Dynamic Range Videos

Abstract

There are different kinds of high dynamic range (HDR) displays in the market today. These displays have different HDR specifications, like, pealddark brightness levels, electro-optical transfer functions (EOTF), color spaces etc. For the best visual experience on a given HDR screen, colorists have to grade videos for that specific display’s luminance range. Uut simultaneous transmission of multiple video bitstreams graded at different luminance ranges, is inefficient in terms of network utility and server storage. To overcome this problem, we propose transmitting our progressive metadata with a base layer video bitstream. This embedding allows different overlapping portions of metadata to scale the base video to progressively wider luminance ranges. Our progressive metadata format provides a significant design improvement over the existing architectures, preserves colorist intent at all the supported brightness ranges and still keeps the bandwidth or storage overhead minimal.