Screen reflections impact on HDR video tone mapping for mobile devices: an evaluation study

Abstract

This paper presents an evaluation of high-dynamic-range (HDR) video tone mapping on a small screen device (SSD) under reflections. Reflections are common on mobile devices as these devices are predominantly used on the go. With this evaluation, we study the impact of reflections on the screen and how different HDR video tone mapping operators (TMOs) perform under reflective conditions as well as understand if there is a need to develop a new or hybrid TMO that can deal with reflections better. Two well-known HDR video TMOs were evaluated in order to test their performance with and without on-screen reflections. Ninety participants were asked to rank the TMOs for a number of tone-mapped HDR video sequences on an SSD against a reference HDR display. The results show that the greater the area exposed to reflections, the larger the negative impact on a TMO's perceptual accuracy. The results also show that under observed conditions, when reflections are present, the hybrid TMOs do not perform better than the standard TMOs.