Perceptual Assessment and Optimization of HDR Image Rendering

Peibei Cao, Rafal K. Mantiuk, Kede Ma; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 22433-22443

High dynamic range (HDR) rendering has the ability to faithfully reproduce the wide luminance ranges in natural scenes but how to accurately assess the rendering quality is relatively underexplored. Existing quality models are mostly designed for low dynamic range (LDR) images and do not align well with human perception of HDR image quality. To fill this gap we propose a family of HDR quality metrics in which the key step is employing a simple inverse display model to decompose an HDR image into a stack of LDR images with varying exposures. Subsequently these decomposed images are assessed through well-established LDR quality metrics. Our HDR quality models present three distinct benefits. First they directly inherit the recent advancements of LDR quality metrics. Second they do not rely on human perceptual data of HDR image quality for re-calibration. Third they facilitate the alignment and prioritization of specific luminance ranges for more accurate and detailed quality assessment. Experimental results show that our HDR quality metrics consistently outperform existing models in terms of quality assessment on four HDR image quality datasets and perceptual optimization of HDR novel view synthesis.