High-dynamic-range still-image encoding in JPEG 2000

The raw size of a high-dynamic-range (HDR) image brings about problems in storage and transmission. Many bytes are wasted in data redundancy and perceptually unimportant information. To address this problem, researchers have proposed some preliminary algorithms to compress the data, like RGBE/XYZE, OpenEXR, LogLuv, and so on. HDR images can have a dynamic range of more than four orders of magnitude while conventional 8-bit images retain only two orders of magnitude of the dynamic range. This distinction between an HDR image and a conventional image leads to difficulties in using most existing image compressors. JPEG 2000 supports up to 16-bit integer data, so it can already provide image compression for most HDR images. In this article, we propose a JPEG 2000-based lossy image compression scheme for HDR images of all dynamic ranges. We show how to fit HDR encoding into a JPEG 2000 encoder to meet the HDR encoding requirement. To achieve the goal of minimum error in the logarithm domain, we map the logarithm of each pixel value into integer values and then send the results to a JPEG 2000 encoder. Our approach is basically a wavelet-based HDR still-image encoding method.