Sensitivity of Tone Mapped Image Quality Metrics to Perceptually Hardly Noticeable Differences

Abstract

As high dynamic range images are being used more widely, the need for good tone mapping operators (TMOs) i.e. methods for their conversion to low dynamic range images rises as well. In evaluation of results of TMOs objective image quality metrics are often used for practical reasons. Since these metrics only approximate perceptual evaluation, they are sometimes too sensitive to perceptually unimportant details. In this paper such sensitivities of three recent tone mapped image quality metrics are compared: TMQI, TMQI-II, and FSITM. These metrics have been chosen because they are the most appropriate objective quality metrics for the problem of tone mapping. The comparison is performed by using specifically designed tone mapped images to check the measures’ susceptibility to perceptually unnoticeable changes in brightness of the resulting image. It is shown that while values of TMQI and FSITM are only slightly affected by such changes, the recent TMQI-II can obtain significantly different values, which brings into question its ability perform a fair TMO comparison. The results are presented and discussed.

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BibTeX Citation

DOI

10.20532/ccvw.2016.0005

https://doi.org/10.20532/ccvw.2016.0005

BibTeX

@InProceedings{10.20532/ccvw.2016.0005,
  author =       {Bani{\' c}, Nikola and Lon{\v c}ari{\' c}, Sven},
  title =        {Sensitivity of Tone Mapped Image Quality Metrics to
                  Perceptually Hardly Noticeable Differences},
  booktitle =    {Proceedings of the Croatian Compter Vision Workshop,
                  Year 4},
  pages =        {15-18},
  year =         2016,
  editor =       {Lon{\v c}ari{\' c}, Sven and Cupec, Robert},
  address =      {Osijek},
  month =        {October},
  organization = {Center of Excellence for Computer Vision},
  publisher =    {University of Zagreb},
  abstract =     {As high dynamic range images are being used more
                  widely, the need for good tone mapping operators
                  (TMOs) i.e. methods for their conversion to low
                  dynamic range images rises as well. In evaluation of
                  results of TMOs objective image quality metrics are
                  often used for practical reasons. Since these
                  metrics only approximate perceptual evaluation, they
                  are sometimes too sensitive to perceptually
                  unimportant details. In this paper such
                  sensitivities of three recent tone mapped image
                  quality metrics are compared: TMQI, TMQI-II, and
                  FSITM. The comparison is performed by using
                  specifically designed tone mapped images to check
                  the measures' susceptibility to perceptually
                  unnoticeable changes in brightness of the resulting
                  image. It is shown that while values of TMQI and
                  FSITM are only slightly affected by such changes,
                  the recent TMQI-II can obtain significantly
                  different values, which brings into question its
                  ability perform a fair TMO comparison. The results
                  are presented and discussed.},
  doi =          {10.20532/ccvw.2016.0005},
  url =          {https://doi.org/10.20532/ccvw.2016.0005}
}