On improving the pooling in HDR-VDP-2 towards better HDR perceptual quality assessment

TLDR: The HDR Visual Difference Predictor (HDR-VDP-2) is primarily a visibility prediction metric i.e. whether the signal distortion is visible to the eye and to what extent and it also employs a pooling function to compute an overall quality score.

Abstract: High Dynamic Range (HDR) signals capture much higher contrasts as compared to the traditional 8-bit low dynamic range (LDR) signals. This is achieved by representing the visual signal via values that are related to the real-world luminance, instead of gamma encoded pixel values which is the case with LDR. Therefore, HDR signals cover a larger luminance range and tend to have more visual appeal. However, due to the higher luminance conditions, the existing methods cannot be directly employed for objective quality assessment of HDR signals. For that reason, the HDR Visual Difference Predictor (HDR-VDP-2) has been proposed. HDR-VDP-2 is primarily a visibility prediction metric i.e. whether the signal distortion is visible to the eye and to what extent. Nevertheless, it also employs a pooling function to compute an overall quality score. This paper focuses on the pooling aspect in HDR-VDP-2 and employs a comprehensive database of HDR images (with their corresponding subjective ratings) to improve the prediction accuracy of HDR-VDP-2. We also discuss and evaluate the existing objective methods and provide a perspective towards better HDR quality assessment.