Inverse Tone Mapping Operators Evaluation Using Blind Image Quality Assessment

Recently more and more researches work on reproducing real-world appearance images through LDR images using inverse tone mapping methods. Therefore, evaluation metrics to qualify the performance of inverse tone mapping operators (iTMO) are needed to understand the effect of important features such as nonlinearity. Most metric requires a reference ground truth to compare with the resulting HDR images. However, a reference HDR image may not be available or hard to verify as a ground truth. In this work, we propose a blind image quality assessment that measures test images without information from reference images. The blind image estimation method contains attributes of contrast, brightness, and colorfulness. The analysis results of contrast and brightness matches with that of the JNDbased contrast analysis and human perception.