Color signal encoding for high dynamic range and wide color gamut based on human perception

A new EOTF based on human perception, called PQ (Perceptual Quantizer), was proposed in a previous work (SMPTE Mot. Imag. J 2013, 122:52-59) and its performance was evaluated for a wide range of luminance levels and encoding bitdepth values. This paper is an extension of that previous work to include the color aspects of the PQ signal encoding. The efficiency of the PQ encoding and bit-depth requirements were evaluated and compared for standard color gamuts of Rec 709 (SRGB), and the wide color gamuts of Rec 2020, P3, and ACES for a variety of signal representations as RGB, YCbCr, and XYZ. In a selected color space for any potential local gray level 26 color samples were simulated by deviating one quantization step from the original color in each signal dimension. The quantization step sizes were simulated based on the PQ and gamma curves for different bit-depth values and luminance ranges for each of the color gamut spaces and signal representations. Color differences between the gray field and the simulated color samples were computed using CIE DE2000 color difference equation. The maximum color difference values (quantization error) were used as a metric to evaluate the performance of the corresponding EOTF curve. Extended color gamuts were found to require more bits to maintain low quantization error. Extended dynamic range required fewer additional bits in to maintain quantization error. Regarding the visual detection thresholds, the minimum bit-depth required by the PQ and gamma encodings are evaluated and compared through visual experiments.