Quality Assessment of HDR/WCG Images Using HDR Uniform Color Spaces

Abstract

High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wide Color Gamut (WCG) screens are able to render brighter and darker pixels with more vivid colors than ever. To assess the quality of images and videos displayed on these screens, new quality assessment metrics adapted to this new content are required. Because most SDR metrics assume that the representation of images is perceptually uniform, we study the impact of three uniform color spaces developed specifically for HDR and WCG images, namely, I C t C p , J z a z b z and H D R - L a b on 12 SDR quality assessment metrics. Moreover, as the existing databases of images annotated with subjective scores are using a standard gamut, two new HDR databases using WCG are proposed. Results show that MS-SSIM and FSIM are among the most reliable metrics. This study also highlights the fact that the diffuse white of HDR images plays an important role when adapting SDR metrics for HDR content. Moreover, the adapted SDR metrics does not perform well to predict the impact of chrominance distortions.

Keywords

• image quality
• High Dynamic Range
• color gamut
• image representation
• image analysis
• image processing