HDR-VDP-2.2: a calibrated method for objective quality prediction of high-dynamic range and standard images

With the emergence of High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging, the existing visual signal processing systems will need to deal with both HDR and standard dynamic range (SDR) signals. In such systems, computing the objective quality is an important aspect in various optimization processes (eg. video encoding). To that end, this letter presents a newly calibrated objective method that can tackle both HDR and SDR signals. As it is based on the previously proposed HDR-VDP-2 method, we refer to the newly calibrated metric as HDR-VDP-2.2. Our main contribution is towards improving the frequency based pooling in HDR-VDP-2 to enhance its objective quality prediction accuracy. We achieve this by formulating and solving a constrained optimization problem and thereby finding the optimal pooling weights. We also carried out extensive cross-validation as well as verified the performance of the new method on independent databases. These indicate clear improvement in prediction accuracy as compared to the default pooling weights. The source codes for HDR-VDP-2.2 are publicly available at http://hdrvdp.sf.net/, for free download and use.