Locally Weighted Mean Phase Angle (LWMPA) Based Tone Mapping Quality Index (TMQI-3)

TL;DR

This paper introduces TMQI-3, a new noise-resilient metric for evaluating the quality of tone-mapped LDR images from HDR sources, considering structure, naturalness, and color in a unified way.

Contribution

The paper proposes TMQI-3, a novel objective quality metric that improves upon existing models by being noise resilient and incorporating structure and naturalness across all color channels.

Findings

TMQI-3 outperforms baseline models in quality assessment.

It effectively evaluates structure, naturalness, and color in tone-mapped images.

The metric is applicable to various HDR and LDR images from literature.

Abstract

High Dynamic Range (HDR) images are the ones that contain a greater range of luminosity as compared to the standard images. HDR images have a higher detail and clarity of structure, objects, and color, which the standard images lack. HDR images are useful in capturing scenes that pose high brightness, darker areas, and shadows, etc. An HDR image comprises multiple narrow-range-exposure images combined into one high-quality image. As these HDR images cannot be displayed on standard display devices, the real challenge comes while converting these HDR images to Low dynamic range (LDR) images. The conversion of HDR image to LDR image is performed using Tone-mapped operators (TMOs). This conversion results in the loss of much valuable information in structure, color, naturalness, and exposures. The loss of information in the LDR image may not directly be visible to the human eye. To calculate how good an LDR image is after conversion, various metrics have been proposed previously. Some are not noise resilient, some work on separate color channels (Red, Green, and Blue one by one), and some lack capacity to identify the structure. To deal with this problem, we propose a metric in this paper called the Tone Mapping Quality Index (TMQI-3), which evaluates the quality of the LDR image based on its objective score. TMQI-3 is noise resilient, takes account of structure and naturalness, and works on all three color channels combined into one luminosity component. This eliminates the need to use multiple metrics at the same time. We compute results for several HDR and LDR images from the literature and show that our quality index metric performs better than the baseline models.