Optimal exposure compression for high dynamic range content

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging has become one of the foremost imaging methods capable of capturing and displaying the full range of lighting perceived by the human visual system in the real world. A number of HDR compression methods for both images and video have been developed to handle HDR data, but none of them has yet been adopted as the method of choice. In particular, the backwards-compatible methods that always maintain a stream/image that allow part of the content to be viewed on conventional displays make use of tone mapping operators which were developed to view HDR images on traditional displays. There are a large number of tone mappers, none of which is considered the best as the images produced could be deemed subjective. This work presents an alternative to tone mapping-based HDR content compression by identifying a single exposure that can reproduce the most information from the original HDR image. This single exposure can be adapted to fit within the bit depth of any traditional encoder. Any additional information that may be lost is stored as a residual. Results demonstrate quality is maintained as well, and better, than other traditional methods. Furthermore, the presented method is backwards-compatible, straightforward to implement, fast and does not require choosing tone mappers or settings.