RATE-DISTORTION OPTIMAL BIT ALLOCATION FOR HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE VIDEO COMPRESSION

An efficient algorithm to compress high dynamic range (HDR) videos is proposed in this work. We separate an HDR video sequence into a tone-mapped low dynamic range (LDR) sequence and a ratio sequence. Then, we encode those two sequences using the standard H.264/AVC codec. During the encoding, we allocate a limited amount of bit budget to the LDR sequence and the ratio sequence adaptively to maximize the qualities of both the LDR and HDR sequences. While a conventional LDR decoder uses only the LDR stream, an HDR decoder can reconstruct the HDR video using the LDR stream and the ratio stream. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides higher performance than the conventional methods.