Real-time temporally coherent local HDR tone mapping

Abstract

Subjective studies showed that most HDR video tone mapping operators either produce disturbing temporal artifacts, or are limited in their local contrast reproduction capability. Recently, both these issues have been addressed by a novel temporally coherent local HDR tone mapping method, which has been shown, both qualitatively and through a subjective study, to be advantageous compared to previous methods. However, this method's high-quality results came at the cost of a computationally expensive workflow that could only be executed offline. In this paper, we present a modified algorithm which builds upon the previous work by redesigning key components to achieve real-time performance. We accomplish this by replacing the optical flow based per-pixel temporal coherency with a tone-curve-space alternative. This way we eliminate the main computational burden of the original method with little sacrifice in visual quality.