Rate-distortion optimized compression of high dynamic range videos

An efficient algorithm to compress high dynamic range (HDR) videos is proposed in this work. We employ the motion information to separate an HDR video sequence into a tone-mapped low dynamic range (LDR) sequence and a ratio sequence. Then, those two sequences are encoded using the standard H.264/AVC codec. During the encoding, we allocate the limited bit budget to the LDR sequence and the ratio sequence optimally to maximize the qualities of the LDR and HDR sequences. Conventional LDR devices use only the LDR stream, whereas HDR devices reconstruct the HDR video using the LDR stream and the ratio stream. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm provides better performance than the conventional methods. copyright by EURASIP.