A New Encoding Scheme for HDR Images

Human eye can perceive a much higher dynamic range compared to what can be displayed on paper or a computer screen. Recently, advanced techniques have been available to capture much larger amount of details of natural scenes. These images are then tone-mapped to lower dynamic range versions for displaying on paper or a screen. For certain applications, available now or expected in near future, the additional information contained in the higher dynamic range images is also important, and needs to be preserved. However, the size of these images is very large and that gives rise to need of special encoding techniques for these images. In this paper, we present such a technique, which significantly reduces the size of the high dynamic range images, with a negligible loss of information. Comparison with the existing state of the art technique is given to show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.