High contrast tone-mapping and its application for two-layer High Dynamic Range coding

Many applications for High Dynamic Range (HDR) images require tone-mapping operations that preserve details in whole luminance range. This paper proposes a high contrast tone-mapping operator using a multi-scale contrast enhancement, and uses it for a high efficiency two-layer HDR coding. To visualize minute details, the high contrast tone-mapping operator often results in hard enhancement. In many conventional two-layer coding methods, it degrades compression efficiency. In contrast our method can achieve both of the high contrast and high compression efficiency. Moreover this paper can perform two types of tone-mapping which generates the images with strong enhancement and natural look. This paper shows the validity of our methods through some experimental results.