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Dealing with HDR videos - Temporally Coherent Local Tone Mapping
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Recent subjective studies showed that current tone mapping operators either produce disturbing temporal artifacts, or are limited in their local contrast reproduction capability. We address both of these issues and present an HDR video tone mapping operator that can greatly reduce the input dynamic range, while at the same time preserving scene details without causing significant visual artifacts. To achieve this, we revisit the commonly used spatial base-detail layer decomposition and extend it to the temporal domain. We achieve high quality spatiotemporal edge-aware filtering efficiently by using a mathematically justified iterative approach that approximates a global solution. Comparison with the state-of-the-art, both qualitatively, and quantitatively through a controlled subjective experiment, clearly shows our method’s advantages over previous work.

    http://www.disneyresearch.com/publication/temporally-coherent-local-tone-mapping-of-hdr-video/

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  • thepalaliasthepalalias

    I was surprised that (from the screenshot) it looked like they only included the 08 version of Mantiuk when my preference is for the older Mantiuk version. But perhaps when I look at the whole video it will make sense. :)

    EDIT: So after watching the video here are my additional thoughts.

    • The results of using the older Mantiuk are more dramatic in terms of contrast than the new one and I still wish they had been included. You can try them for yourself on stills for free through LuminanceHDR at http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/ and I did a fair amount of testing etc. to help them make the batch mode work properly a long time ago, so at least some of the versions can do that (though I can't remember if that's only 8-bit output or 16-bit too, now).

    • Disney's temporal approach is interesting and potentially very helpful. I have not seen that included natively in something like this before and previously had to use other methods, post output, to try to compensate for some operators. With that said, the older Mantiuk did MUCH better with avoiding flicker than a ton of other operators (unlike, for instance, the old Oloneo Photoengine which had tons of issue with that in a batch set).

    • If Disney's approach can handle noise and blacks better, then that's great. With the older Mantiuk, one issue I often encountered involved doing timelapses from daytime to night time, where the noise in the night time ones would sometimes get amplified so much that I would end up crossfading into the brightest exposures instead. You can see that technique applied in the video below, which I did nearly three years ago. In the video, it starts with the older tonemapped Mantiuk 06 and then fades into just bright exposures instead. Excuse the point at which the tripod gets knocked (hard) and the framing changes. :)

    Password: gp2012

  • FeriGGGGFeriGGGG

    IMHO, local tone mapping processing is something that must advance for us to able to deal with the dynamic range that is now availabe in cameras, not just cause of limited DR of our display. my dell S2440L has a measured max DR of 11EVs =3000:1, and from my experience of outdoor shooting, its definitely not pleasent for my eyes to watch scenes for longer periods with 11ev DR for example half screen sky/shadow area. therefore local tonemaping = global compression of contrast with preservation of local contrast is something that is more beneficial than just adjusting global contrast.

  • karlkarl

    British Telecom recently published a research paper on UHD TV and related technology (like HDR and color space extensions and high frame rate video), which I think is worth reading.

    Another interesting document is this presentation on A Perceptual Electro Optical Transfer Function for Extended Dynamic Range Imagery as it describes the most relevant ideas behind the SMPTE ST 2084:2014 standard, which is linked to the CEA 861.3 standard on how to encode the HDR meta data, which are the "HDR" standards now supported for the first time by some consumer TVs from LG and Samsung.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Each time I read about this energy efficiency directives I want to puke. Invented and promoted by idiots, things result in image quality degradation and some idiot energy saving modes set by default.

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