Rate distortion analysis of high dynamic range video coding techniques

High Dynamic Range (HDR) is a key technology envisioned to provide the end-users a sense of “being there”. With the advent of HDR displays in the near future, it is not clear if the existing content distribution environment will be capable of supporting HDR. Although it is generally argued that single-layer HDR coding solutions are superior to two-layer backward-compatible techniques, these coding strategies have not been fully investigated in terms of their rate distortion trade-off. In this paper, three main HDR coding techniques are implemented to analyze their performance and to evaluate the potential of HDR content distribution, while minimizing the impact on existing infrastructure, i.e., in terms of bitrate and HDR quality trade-off. The results reveal that backward-compatible solutions can outperform the single-layer approach achieving PSNR_DE improvements of up to 3.05dB on average. The HDR-VDP-2 quality indexes show similar improvements further confirming the superior performance of the backward-compatible solutions.