Improving the tone mapping operators by using a redefined version of the luminance channel

Abstract

Tone mapping operators (TMOs) convert high dynamic range (HDR) images to low dynamic range (LDR) images and are important because of the limitations of many standard display devices. Even though the quality of the resulting LDR image mostly depends on TMO parameter values, in this paper it is shown that it can be further improved by using alternative definitions of the luminance channel, which TMOs process. A new model of the luminance channel calculation that increases the resulting LDR image quality is also proposed. The main advantage of the new model is that the TMOs that produce results of lower quality can be made to produce results of significantly higher quality. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.