The naturalness of reproduced high dynamic range images

The problem of visualizing high dynamic range images on the devices with restricted dynamic range has recently gained a lot of interest in the computer graphics community. Various so-called tone mapping operators have been proposed to face this issue. The field of tone mapping assumes thorough knowledge of both the objective and subjective attributes of an image. However, there no published analysis of such attributes exists so far. In this paper, we present an overview of image attributes which are used extensively in different tone mapping methods. Furthermore, we propose a scheme of relationships between these attributes, leading to the definition of an overall quality measure which we call naturalness. We present results of the subjective psychophysical testing that we have performed to prove the proposed relationship scheme. Our effort sets the stage for well-founded quality comparisons between tone mapping operators. By providing good definitions of the different attributes, comparisons, be they user-driven or fully automatic, are made possible at all.