VR+HDR: A system for view-dependent rendering of HDR video in virtual reality

Abstract

This paper introduces a view-dependent method for rendering high-dynamic-range (HDR) video in virtual reality (VR) on VR displays such as head mounted displays (HMD), mobile phones, TVs, and computer monitors. The user's view direction is taken into account to design a tone-mapping operator which appropriately displays the HDR content on the display device. The proposed method can be utilized if HDR capturing and playback (i.e. HDR camera and 10-bit video codec) are available. However, it can also be used on the 8-bit pipeline (i.e. 8-bit camera and 8-bit video codec). A VR+HDR prototype was implemented using Samsung Gear360 camera and SamsungVR Android app on Samsung Galaxy Note 5 smartphone. The subjective comparison between the proposed method and rendering of 360-degree VR video through global tone mapping was performed using this prototype and showed that for all test sequences, the proposed technique significantly improves the video quality in VR rendering.