Tone mapping with contrast preservation and lightness correction in high dynamic range imaging

In real-world environments, the human visual system perceives a wide range of luminance in a scene. However, the full range of tones in a high dynamic range (HDR) scene cannot be displayed on standard display devices due to their low dynamic range (LDR). Therefore, tone mapping is necessary to faithfully display a HDR scene on an LDR display device. Existing tone mapping methods have problems because details and contrast in a scene are not preserved faithfully, and they also distort the colors in a scene. Thus, we propose a tone mapping method for preserving the detail in an HDR scene using a weighted least squares filter, which preserves the global contrast in a scene by using a competitive learning neural network, before applying a tone reproduction operator to preserve the color without shifting the lightness. According to the Helmholtz–Kohlrausch effect, the perception of brightness depends on the lightness, chroma, and hue of a color. For example, the luminance of pixels with specific colors such as red and blue is low in an HDR scene. The proposed method corrects the lightness of pixels according to the color (i.e., lightness, chroma, and hue) of a tone-mapped image. Experimental results with several test sets of images demonstrated that the proposed tone mapping method with contrast preservation and lightness correction is more suitable for dynamic range compression than existing tone mapping methods, while it also preserves the color of a scene in an effective way.