Recently, there has been significant progress in the research and development of High Dynamic Range (HDR) video technology and state-of-the-art video pipelines are able to offer a higher bit depth support to capture, store, encode and display HDR video content. In this paper, we introduce a novel HDR video compression algorithm which uses a perceptually uniform color opponent space, a novel perceptual transfer function to encode the dynamic range of the scene and a novel error minimization scheme for accurate chroma reproduction. The proposed algorithm was objectively and subjectively evaluated against four state-of-the-art algorithms. The objective evaluation was conducted across a set of 39 HDR video sequences, using the latest x265 10-bit video codec along with several perceptual and structural quality assessment metrics at 11 different quality levels. Furthermore, a rating-based subjective evaluation (n=40) was conducted with six sequences at two different output bitrates. Results suggest that the proposed algorithm exhibits the lowest coding error amongst the five algorithms evaluated. Additionally, rate-distortion characteristics suggest that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing state-of-the-art at bitrates = 0.4 bits/pixel.
Software Implementation:
Xilinx
Advantages:
Novel error minimization scheme introduced for accurate chroma reproduction
The proposed algorithm exhibits the lowest coding error
