Noise Bias Compensation for Reconstructed HDR Images in Two Layer Coding

抄録

We propose a two-layer coding method for HDR images with noise bias compensation (NBC). Although the mean of image noise is assumed to be zero originally, it becomes nonzero (that is, noise bias is present) after tone mapping, because of the nonlinearity of tone mapping. In the conventional two-layer coding, the reconstructed LDR image is decoded using a lossy encoder of a base layer that includes noise; the noise is included in an HDR image that is inverse tone mapped from a reconstructed LDR image with noise bias. We aim to improve the quality of reconstructed HDR images by compensating for noise bias. NBC classifies pixels in a noisy image into several subsets according to the pixel value after tone mapping, and compensates for the pixel value in each subset with a compensation value determined in advance. The compensation values are determined by using all pixel values in the LDR image that is input to the base layer, in addition to those in the HDR image that is inversely tone mapped from the reconstructed LDR image. We perform NBC following inverse tone mapping for the reconstructed LDR image. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.