Design and Implementation of a Real-Time Global Tone Mapping Processor for High Dynamic Range Video

As the development in high dynamic range (HDR) video capture technologies, the bit-depth video encoding and decoding has become an interesting topic. In this paper, we show that the real-time HDR video display is possible. A tone mapping based HDR video architecture pipelined with a video CODEC is presented. The HDR video is compressed by the tone mapping processor. The compressed HDR video can be encoded and decoded by the video standards, such as MPEG2, MPEG4 or H.264 for transmission and display. We propose and implement a modified photographic tone mapping algorithm for the tone mapping processor. The required luminance wordlength in the processor is analyzed and the quantization error is estimated. We also develop the digit-by-digit exponent and logarithm hardware architecture for the tone mapping processor. The synthesized results show that our real-time tone mapping processor can process a NTSC video with 720*480 resolution at 30 frames per second.