CONTENT AWARE QUANTIZATION: REQUANTIZATION OF HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE BASEBAND SIGNALS BASED ON VISUAL MASKING BY NOISE AND TEXTURE

High dynamic range imaging is currently being introduced to television, cinema and computer games. While it has been found that a fixed encoding for high dynamic range imagery needs at least 11 to 12 bits of tonal resolution, current mainstream image transmission interfaces, codecs and file formats are limited to 10 bits. To be able to use current generation imaging pipelines, this paper presents a baseband quantization scheme that exploits content characteristics to reduce the needed tonal resolution per image. The method is of low computational complexity and provides robust performance on a wide range of content types in different viewing environments and applications.