Recent advances in high dynamic range (HDR) capture and display technologies have attracted a lot of interest from\nscientific, professional, and artistic communities. As in any technology, the evaluation of HDR systems in terms of\nquality of experience is essential. Subjective evaluations are time consuming and expensive, and thus objective\nquality assessment tools are needed as well. In this paper, we report and analyze the results of an extensive\nbenchmarking of objective quality metrics for HDR image quality assessment. In total, 35 objective metrics were\nbenchmarked on a database of 20 HDR contents encoded with 3 compression algorithms at 4 bit rates, leading to a\ntotal of 240 compressed HDR images, using subjective quality scores as ground truth. Performance indexes were\ncomputed to assess the accuracy, monotonicity, and consistency of the metric estimation of subjective scores.\nStatistical analysis was performed on the performance indexes to discriminate small differences between metrics.\nResults demonstrated that metrics designed for HDR content, i.e., HDR-VDP-2 and HDR-VQM, are the most reliable\npredictors of perceived quality. Finally, our findings suggested that the performance of most full-reference metrics can\nbe improved by considering non-linearities of the human visual system, while further efforts are necessary to improve\nperformance of no-reference quality metrics for HDR content.
Loading....