Tone Mapping

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is a very attractive way of capturing real world appearance, since it permits the preservation of complete information on luminance (radiance) values in the scene for each pixel. While the prospects for proliferation of HDR capturing and multimedia technologies are good, an important problem to solve regards how to reproduce the precise information for scene appearance using media with very limited dynamic range such as hard-copy prints, CRT displays, and projectors. While this may change in the future due to successful efforts in building HDR displays, at present such devices are relatively rare and expensive. To solve the problem of transforming high dynamic range images to the limited range of most existing devices, so-called tone mapping operators are being developed. Essentially, tone mapping addresses the problem of strong contrast reduction from scene values to displayable ranges while preserving the image details important to appreciate the scene content.

The goals of tone mapping can be differently stated depending on the particular application. In some cases producing just "nice-looking" images is the main goal, while other applications might emphasize reproducing as many image details as possible, or might maximize the image contrast. The goal in realistic rendering applications might be to obtain a perceptual match between a real scene and and a displayed image even though the display device is not able to reproduce the full range of luminance values. However, achieving such a match is feasible because the human visual system (HVS) has limited capacity to detect differences in absolute luminance levels, and concentrates more on aspects of spatial patterns when comparing two images.

We present a number of tone mapping operators developed at MPI in recent years. Also, we show the results of our work on perceptual evaluation of tone mapping operators. We provide also source code for a number of operators and source HDR images.

Tone Mapping Operators

	A Perceptual Framework for Contrast Processing of High Dynamic Range Images Rafal Mantiuk, Karol Myszkowski, Hans-Peter Seidel 2nd Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (APGV 2005). (project page, bibTeX entry)
	Lightness Perception in Tone Reproduction for High Dynamic Range Images Grzegorz Krawczyk, Karol Myszkowski, Hans-Peter Seidel EUROGRAPHICS 2005. (project page, bibTeX entry)
	Perceptual Effects in Real-Time Tone Mapping Grzegorz Krawczyk, Karol Myszkowski, Hans-Peter Seidel Spring Conference on Computer Graphics (SCCG) 2005. (project page, bibTeX entry)
	A CAVE System for Interactive Modeling of Global Illumination in Car Interior Kirill Dmitriev, Thomas. Annen, Grzegorz Krawczyk, Karol Myszkowski, Hans-Peter Seidel ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST), 2004. (pdf, ppt, bibTeX entry)
	Design of a Tone Mapping Operator for High Dynamic Range Images Based upon Psychophysical Evaluation and Preference Mapping Frédéric Drago, William L. Martens, Karol Myszkowski, Hans-Peter Seidel Human Vision and Electronic Imaging VIII, IS&T/SPIE's 15th Annual Symposium on Electronic Imaging, 2003. (pdf, ppt, bibTeX entry)
	Adaptive Logarithmic Mapping for Displaying high Contrast Scenes Frédéric Drago, Karol Myszkowski, Thomas Annen, Norishige Chiba EUROGRAPHICS 2003. (project page, bibTeX entry)

Perceptual Evaluation of Tone Mapping Operators

Because a variety of tone mapping operators have been proposed, a systematic perceptual evaluation is needed to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the wide-range approaches presented in recent years.

	Analysis of Reproducing Real-World Appearance on Displays of Varying Dynamic Range Akiko Yoshida, Rafał Mantiuk, Karol Myszkowski, Hans-Peter Seidel Proc. of Eurographics. To appear. 2006. (project page, pdf)
	Perceptual Evaluation of Tone Mapping Operators with Real-World Scenes Akiko Yoshida, Volker Blanz, Karol Myszkowski, Hans-Peter Seidel Human Vision and Electronic Imaging X, IS&T/SPIE's 17th Annual Symposium on Electronic Imaging, 2005. (pdf, BibTeX Entry)
	Perceptual Evaluation of Tone Mapping Operators with Regard to Similarity and Preference Frédéric Drago, William L. Martens, Karol Myszkowski, Hans-Peter Seidel Technical report, Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, 2002. (pdf, Experiment Page, BibTeX Entry) Yet another Experiment Page which includes more modern tone mapping operators with images generated by their respective authors (Michael Ashikhmin, Fredo Durand, Dani Lischinski, Erik Reinhard, and Greg Ward). We would to thank all listed persons for their help in preparing the tone mapped images. We provide parameter settings used to obtain those images in order to enable the results reproducibility.

Resources

PFStools: Library and a set of command line tools (and a viewer) for reading, writing, manipulating, and viewing HDR images and video frames.
PFStmo: Implementation of state-of-the-art tone mapping operators.
PFScalibration: Photometric calibration of HDR and LDR cameras.
HDR Source Image Gallery
Reference Tone Mapped Images

Contact

Comments and suggestions related to the project are very welcome. For further information please contact Grzegorz Krawczyk, Karol Myszkowski or Rafal Mantiuk.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported partly by the European Community within the scope of the RealReflect project IST-2001-34744 "Realtime visualization of complex reflectance behavior in virtual prototyping".