Gain-MLP: Improving HDR Gain Map Encoding via a Lightweight MLP

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Canham, Trevor D., Tedla, SaiKiran, Murdoch, Michael J., Brown, Michael S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Canham, Trevor D.
Tedla, SaiKiran
Murdoch, Michael J.
Brown, Michael S.
author_facet Canham, Trevor D.
Tedla, SaiKiran
Murdoch, Michael J.
Brown, Michael S.
contents While most images shared on the web and social media platforms are encoded in standard dynamic range (SDR), many displays now can accommodate high dynamic range (HDR) content. Additionally, modern cameras can capture images in an HDR format but convert them to SDR to ensure maximum compatibility with existing workflows and legacy displays. To support both SDR and HDR, new encoding formats are emerging that store additional metadata in SDR images in the form of a gain map. When applied to the SDR image, the gain map recovers the HDR version of the image as needed. These gain maps, however, are typically down-sampled and encoded using standard image compression, such as JPEG and HEIC, which can result in unwanted artifacts. In this paper, we propose to use a lightweight multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network to encode the gain map. The MLP is optimized using the SDR image information as input and provides superior performance in terms of HDR reconstruction. Moreover, the MLP-based approach uses a fixed memory footprint (10 KB) and requires no additional adjustments to accommodate different image sizes or encoding parameters. We conduct extensive experiments on various MLP based HDR embedding strategies and demonstrate that our approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_11883
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Gain-MLP: Improving HDR Gain Map Encoding via a Lightweight MLP
Canham, Trevor D.
Tedla, SaiKiran
Murdoch, Michael J.
Brown, Michael S.
Image and Video Processing
While most images shared on the web and social media platforms are encoded in standard dynamic range (SDR), many displays now can accommodate high dynamic range (HDR) content. Additionally, modern cameras can capture images in an HDR format but convert them to SDR to ensure maximum compatibility with existing workflows and legacy displays. To support both SDR and HDR, new encoding formats are emerging that store additional metadata in SDR images in the form of a gain map. When applied to the SDR image, the gain map recovers the HDR version of the image as needed. These gain maps, however, are typically down-sampled and encoded using standard image compression, such as JPEG and HEIC, which can result in unwanted artifacts. In this paper, we propose to use a lightweight multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network to encode the gain map. The MLP is optimized using the SDR image information as input and provides superior performance in terms of HDR reconstruction. Moreover, the MLP-based approach uses a fixed memory footprint (10 KB) and requires no additional adjustments to accommodate different image sizes or encoding parameters. We conduct extensive experiments on various MLP based HDR embedding strategies and demonstrate that our approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art.
title Gain-MLP: Improving HDR Gain Map Encoding via a Lightweight MLP
topic Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11883