Spatio-temporal tone mapping operator based on a retina model

Abstract

From moonlight to bright sun shine, real world visual scenes contain a very wide range of luminance; they are said to be High Dynamic Range (HDR). Our visual system is well adapted to explore and analyze such a variable visual content. It is now possible to acquire such HDR contents with digital cameras; however it is not possible to render them all on standard displays, which have only Low Dynamic Range (LDR) capabilities. This rendering usually generates bad exposure or loss of information. It is necessary to develop locally adaptive Tone Mapping Operators (TMO) to compress a HDR content to a LDR one and keep as much information as possible. The human retina is known to perform such a task to overcome the limited range of values which can be coded by neurons. The purpose of this paper is to present a TMO inspired from the retina properties. The presented biological model allows reliable dynamic range compression with natural color constancy properties. Moreover, its non-separable spatio-temporal filter enhances HDR video content processing with an added temporal constancy. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.