Deep Tone-Mapping Operator Using Image Quality Assessment Inspired Semi-Supervised Learning

Tone-mapping operator (TMO) is intended to convert high dynamic range (HDR) content into a lower dynamic range so that it can be displayed on a standard dynamic range (SDR) device. The tone-mapped result of HDR content is usually stored as SDR image. For different HDR scenes, traditional TMOs are able to obtain a satisfying SDR image only under manually fine-tuned parameters. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a learning-based TMO using deep convolutional neural network (CNN). We explore different CNN structure and adopt multi-scale and multi-branch fully convolutional design. When training deep CNN, we introduce image quality assessments (IQA), specifically, tone-mapped image quality assessment, and implement it as semi-supervised loss terms. We discuss and prove the effectiveness of semi-supervised loss terms, CNN structure, data pre-processing, etc. by several experiments. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach can produce appealing results under diversified HDR scenes.