Evaluation of Tone‐Mapping Operators for HDR Video Under Different Ambient Luminance Levels

Since high dynamic range (HDR) displays are not yet widely available, there is still a need to perform a dynamic range reduction of HDR content to reproduce it properly on standard dynamic range (SDR) displays. The most common techniques for performing this reduction are termed tone‐mapping operators (TMOs). Although mobile devices are becoming widespread, methods for displaying HDR content on these SDR screens are still very much in their infancy. While several studies have been conducted to evaluate TMOs, few have been done with a goal of testing small screen displays (SSDs), common on mobile devices. This paper presents an evaluation of six state‐of‐the‐art HDR video TMOs. The experiments considered three different levels of ambient luminance under which 180 participants were asked to rank the TMOs for seven tone‐mapped HDR video sequences. A comparison was conducted between tone‐mapped HDR video footage shown on an SSD and on a large screen SDR display using an HDR display as reference. The results show that there are differences between the performance of the TMOs under different ambient lighting levels and the TMOs that perform well on traditional large screen displays also perform well on SSDs at the same given luminance level.