A Novel Chroma Processing Scheme for Improved Color Accuracy of HDR Video Content

Our eyes do not perceive all colors the same way, being sensitive to changes in some colors more than others. In this work, by taking advantage of this characteristic of the human eye, we propose a chroma processing scheme that reduces the color errors generated by the quantization and subsampling processes in the HDR video delivery pipeline. To this end, our method uses the de-correlated color space of IC
_t
C
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and re-distributes chroma code-words in favor of those colors that our eyes are most sensitive to. Performance evaluations have shown that our proposed chroma processing can improve color accuracy of the tested HDR video content by an average of 18.6% and 26.2% in terms of color accuracy compared to that of the 10-bit YC
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C
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for the 4:4:4 and 4:2:0 formats, respectively. Additionally, subjective evaluations showed that the proposed chroma processing scheme does not negatively affect the overall compression performance while it preserves colors through the quantization and subsampling processes much more accurately than existing methods.