Visually Favorable Tone-Mapping With High Compression Performance in Bit-Depth Scalable Video Coding

In bit-depth scalable video coding, the tone-mapping scheme used to convert high-bit-depth to eight-bit videos is an essential yet very often ignored component. In this paper, we demonstrate that an appropriate choice of a tone-mapping operator can improve the coding efficiency of bit-depth scalable encoders. We present a new tone-mapping scheme that delivers superior compression efficiency while adhering to a predefined base layer perceptual quality. We develop numerical models that estimate the base layer bit-rate (R
_b
), the enhancement layer bitrate (R
_e
), and the mismatch (Q
_L
) between the resulting low dynamic range (LDR) base-layer signal and the predefined base layer representation. Our proposed tone curve is given by the solution of an optimization problem which minimizes a weighted sum of R
_b
, R
_e
, and Q
_L
. The problem formulation also considers the temporal effect of tone-mapping by adding a constraint to the optimization problem that suppresses flickering artifacts. We also propose a technique with which to tone-map a high-bit-depth video directly in a compression-friendly color space (e.g., one luma and two chroma channels) without converting to the RGB domain. Experimental results show that we can save up to 40% of the total bit-rate (or 3.5 dB PSNR improvement for the same bitrate), and, in general, about 20% bit-rate savings can be achieved.