Adaptive Reshaper for High Dynamic Range and Wide Color Gamut Video Compression

High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wider Color Gamut (WCG) content represents a greater range of luminance levels and a more complete reproduction of colors found in real-world scenes. The characteristics of HDR/WCG content are very different from the SDR content. It poses a challenge to the compression system which is originally designed for SDR content. Recently in MPEG/VCEG, two directions have been taken to improve compression performances for HDR/WCG video using HEVC Main10 codec. The first direction is to improve HDR-10 using encoder optimization. The second direction is to modify the video signal in pre/post processing to better fit compression system. The process therefore is out of coding loop and does not involve changes to the HEVC specification. Among many proposals in the second direction, reshaper is identified to be the key component. In this paper, a novel luma reshaper is presented which re-allocates the codewords to help codec improve subjective quality. In addition, encoder optimization can be performed jointly with reshaping. Experiments are conducted with ICtCp color difference signal. Simulation results show that if both joint optimization of reshaper and encoder are carried out, there is evidence that improvement over the HDR-10 anchor can be achieved.