Joint Baseband Signal Quantization and Transform Coding for High Dynamic Range Video

Digitally acquired high dynamic range (HDR) video baseband signal can take 10 to 12 bits per color channel. It is of economical importance to be able to reuse the legacy 8 or 10-bit video codecs to efficiently compress the HDR video. Linear or nonlinear mapping on the intensity can be applied to the baseband signal to reduce the dynamic range before the signal is sent to the codec, and we refer to this range reduction step as the baseband quantization. We show analytically and verify using test sequences that the existence of the baseband quantizer lowers the coding efficiency. Experiment shows that as the baseband quantizer strengthened by 1.6 bits, the drop of PSNR at high bitrate is up to 1.60 dB. Our result suggests that, in order to achieve high coding efficiency, video information reduction in terms of quantization error should be incurred in the video codec instead of on the baseband signal.