Effects of display rendering on HDR image quality assessment

High dynamic range (HDR) displays use local backlight modulation to produce both high brightness levels and large contrast ratios. Thus, the display rendering algorithm and its parameters may greatly affect HDR visual experience. In this paper, we analyze the impact of display rendering on perceived quality for a specific display (SIM2 HDR47) and for a popular application scenario, i.e., HDR image compression. To this end, we assess whether significant differences exist between subjective quality of compressed images, when these are displayed using either the built-in rendering of the display, or a rendering algorithm developed by ourselves. As a second contribution of this paper, we investigate whether the possibility to estimate the true pixel-wise luminance emitted by the display, offered by our rendering approach, can improve the performance of HDR objective quality metrics that require true pixel-wise luminance as input.