Influence of Context and Content on Tone-mapping Operators

High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging is one of the technologies that are changing photo, TV, and film industries. The popularity and full public adoption of HDR content is however hindered by the lack of standards in evaluation of quality, file formats, and compression, as well as large legacy base of Low Dynamic Range (LDR) displays that are unable to render HDR. Many tone-mapping operators, aiming to generating viewable LDR content from HDR, were developed to resolve the legacy hardware and software problem. However, there is no consensus on which tone-mapping to use and under which conditions. This paper, via a series of subjective evaluations, demonstrates the dependency of the perceptual quality of the tone-mapped LDR images on the context, such as environmental factors and display parameters, and image content. The results of subjective tests indicate a significant influence of context and content on performance of tone-mapping, and, therefore, both should be considered in applications generating LDR from HDR.