Motion-guided quantization for video tone mapping

Tone Mapping Operators (TMOs) transform High Dynamic Range (HDR) contents to address Low Dynamic Range (LDR) displays. However, before reaching the end-user, these contents are usually compressed using a codec (coder-decoder) for broadcasting or storage purposes. Achieving the best trade-off between rendering and compression efficiency is of prime importance. Any TMO includes a rounding quantization to convert floating point values to integer ones. In this work, we propose to modify this quantization to increase the compression efficiency of the tone mapped content. By using a motion compensation, our technique preserves the rendering intent of the TMO while maximizing the correlations between successive frames. Experimental results show that we can save up to 12% of the total bit-rate as well as an average bit-rate reduction of 8.5% for all the test sequences. We show that our technique can be applied to other applications such as denoising.

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