Abstract:

This paper presents a technique for coding high dynamic range videos. The proposed coding scheme is scalable, such that both standard dynamic range and high dynamic range representations of a video can be extracted from one bit stream. A localized inverse tone mapping method is proposed for efficient inter-layer prediction, which applies a scaling factor and an offset to each macroblock, per color channel. The scaling factors and offsets are predicted from neighboring macroblocks, and then the differences are entropy coded. The proposed inter-layer prediction technique is independent of the forward tone mapping method and is able to cover a wide range of bit-depths and various color spaces. Simulations are performed based on H.264/AVC SVC common software and core experiment conditions. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.