International Journal of Computer Vision c 2006 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. Manufactured in The Netherlands. DOI: 10.1007/s11263-005-3846-z Tone Reproduction: A Perspective from Luminance-Driven Perceptual Grouping HWANN-TZONG CHEN Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei 115, Taiwan; Department of CSIE, National Taiwan University, Taipei 106, Taiwan
[email protected] TYNG-LUH LIU Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei 115, Taiwan
[email protected] CHIOU-SHANN FUH Department of CSIE, National Taiwan University, Taipei 106, Taiwan
[email protected] Received June 16, 2004; Revised May 24, 2005; Accepted June 29, 2005 First online version published in January, 2006 Abstract. We address the tone reproduction problem by integrating the local adaptation effect with the consistency in global contrast impression. Many previous works on tone reproduction have focused on investigating the local adaptation mechanism of human eyes to compress high-dynamic-range (HDR) luminance into a displayable range. Nevertheless, while the realization of local adaptation properties is not theoretically defined, exaggerating such effects often leads to unnatural visual impression of global contrast. We propose to perceptually decompose the luminance into a small number of regions that sequentially encode the overall impression of an HDR image. A piecewise tone mapping can then be constructed to region-wise perform HDR compressions, using local mappings constrained by the estimated global perception. Indeed, in our approach, the region information is used not only to practically approximate the local properties of luminance, but more importantly to retain the global impression. Besides, it is worth mentioning that the proposed algorithm is efficient, and mostly does not require excessive parameter fine-tuning.