Disney Research makes HDR work with conventional TVs

The House of Mouse has come up with an innovative new technique that mitigates most of the problems that tone mapping introduces when it interprets HDR images for conventional television sets.

Tone mapping is a very inexact tool for manipulating a very exact image and can cause all sorts of problems as a result: brightness flicker, unwanted camera noise and ghosting amongst others. However, as HDR becomes an increasingly mainstream concern and more and more pipelines are established for producing it, ensuring that HDR images work on normal consumer grade equipment has become something of a holy grail.

Disney’s key innovation lies in the use of temporal filtering through per-pixel motion paths, which allows the team to achieve temporal stability without ghosting. The images produced on the video below are certainly impressive, and while the team admits that they don’t represent the last word in the problem, they believe that they significantly advance the state-of-the-art “and pave the way for the (much needed) future work in this field.”

Have a look for yourself below, or download the detailed research paper here: Temporally Coherent Local Tone Mapping of HDR Video