Tone Mapping Operators: Progressing Towards Semantic-awareness

A Tone Mapping Operator (TMO) aims at reproducing the visual perception of a scene with a high dynamic range (HDR) on low dynamic range (LDR) media. TMOs have primarily aimed to preserve global perception by employing a model of human visual system (HVS), analysing perceptual attributes of each pixel and adjusting exposure at the pixel level. Preserving semantic perception, also an essential step for HDR rendering, has never been in explicit focus. We argue that explicitly introducing semantic information to create a ‘content and semantic’-aware TMO has the potential to further improve existing approaches. In this paper, we therefore propose a new local tone mapping approach by introducing semantic information using off-the-shelf semantic segmentation tools into a novel tone mapping pipeline. More specifically, we adjust pixel values to a semantic specific target to reproduce the real-world semantic perception.