Analysis of tone mapping operators on high dynamic range images

Abstract

Tone manipulation is a luminance compression, which usually causes darker tones to appear brighter and distorts contrast relationships. Tone mapping reduces the dynamic range or contrast ratio of the entire image. High Dynamic range imaging is an attractive technique to capture real world luminance in the scene for each pixel. Various tone mapping operators such as Drago, Reinhard, Ward, Ashikmin, Piecewise, Retinex are available for converting high dynamic range images to displayable low dynamic range image. The performance of various tone mapping operators are evaluated. Multiple exposure pictures are combined together to form a High Dynamic Range image (HDR) and tone mapping operators are applied to form Low Dynamic Range image (LDR) and the result images are compared with the original image. Color correction and Hierarchical tone mappings are applied to enhance the image quality.