Color imaging systems are continuously improving, and have now improved to the point of capturing high dynamic range scenes. Unfortunately most commercially available color display devices, such as CRTs and LCDs, are limited in their dynamic range. It is necessary to tone-map, or render, the high dynamic range images in order to display them onto a lower dynamic range device. This paper describes the use of an image appearance model, iCAM, to render high dynamic range images for display. Image appearance models have greater flexibility over dedicated tone-scaling algorithms as they are designed to predict how images perceptually appear, and not designed for the singular purpose of rendering. In this paper we discuss the use of an image appearance framework, and describe specific implementation details for using that framework to render high dynamic range images.
Garrett M. Johnson, Mark D. Fairchild