Tone Mapping Operators on Small Screen Devices: An Evaluation Study

In the last decade, an increasing number of techniques have been developed to reproduce high dynamic range imagery on traditional displays. These techniques, known as Tone Mapping Operators (TMOs), have been compared and ranked in different ways according to several image characteristics. However, none of these algorithms has been developed specifically for small screen devices (SSD). In this paper, we present an evaluation of currently used TMOs to show that SSDs with limited size, resolution and colour depth require specific research to find or create an appropriate solution. The research described in this paper is based on psychophysical experiments; using three different types of displays (CRT, LCD and SSD). The obtained results show that rankings obtained are similar for the LCD and CRT but are significantly different for the SSD. Furthermore, these rankings show additionally that some characteristics of TMOs need to be emphasized to obtain better high-fidelity mapped images for SSDs.