HMM-Based Framework to Measure the Visual Fidelity of Tone Mapping Operators

Recent advancements in the image capturing techniques and post processing software generate High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. Such images retain maximum information of the scene by capturing more realistic visual contents, which are often missed in traditional image capturing techniques. In this regard, tone mapping operators (TMOs) play a significant role in displaying HDR image contents on a traditional Low Dynamic Range (LDR) display. These operators tend to introduce artifacts in the original HDR image to change its brightness and contrast in such a way that it can destroy the important textures and information of the image. The assessment of these TMOs is a challenging topic to select best the best technique considering different perceptual and quality dimensions. In this paper, we propose to compare TMOs through their impact on visual behavior in comparison with HDR condition. This study is the first of its kind to utilize hidden markov model (HMM) as a similarity measure to evaluate perceived quality of TMO. The findings suggest that the proposed HMM-based method which emphasizes on temporal information produce better evaluation metric than the traditional approaches which are based only on visual spatial information.