Abstract
A global tone mapping operation (TMO) for high dynamic range (HDR) images with fixed-point arithmetic is proposed and evaluated in this paper. A TMO generates a low dynamic range (LDR) image from an HDR image by compressing its dynamic range. Since an HDR image is generally expressed in a floating-point data format, a TMO also deals with floating-point data even though a resultant LDR image is integer data. The proposed method treats a floating-point number as two 8-bit integer numbers which correspond to an exponent part and a mantissa part, and applies tone mapping to these integer numbers separately. Moreover, the method conducts all calculations in the tone mapping with only fixed-point arithmetic. As a result, the method reduces a memory cost and a computational cost. The evaluation shows that the proposed method reduces 81.25% of memory usage. The experimental results show that the processing speed of the proposed method with fixed-point arithmetic is 23.1 times faster than the conventional method with floating-point arithmetic. Furthermore, they also show the PSNR of LDR images obtained by the proposed method are comparable to those of the conventional method, though reducing computational and memory cost.
