Delivering Interactivity to Complex Tone Mapping Operators

The accurate display of high dynamic range images requires the application of complex tone mapping operators. These operators are computationally costly, which prevents their usage in interactive applications. We propose a general framework that delivers interactive performance to an important subclass of tone mapping operators, namely global tone mapping operators. The proposed framework consists of four steps: sampling the input image, applying the tone mapping operator, fitting the point-sampled tone mapping curve, and reconstructing the tone mapping curve for all pixels of the input image. We show how to make use of recent graphics hardware while keeping the advantage of generality by performing tone mapping in software. We demonstrate the capabilities of our method by accelerating several common global tone mapping operators and integrating the operators in a real-time rendering application.