Subjective and objective evaluation of HDR video compression

Recent efforts by MPEG and research community to standardize high dynamic range (HDR) video compression require efficient objective metrics. This paper investigates how well the currently available metrics measure perceptual quality of HDR video. For this purpose, subjective tests were conducted using SIM2 HDR monitor and several video sequences provided by MPEG. The sequences were compressed with HEVC encoder in YCbCr420 10bit and YCbCr444 12bit formats. The results of subjective tests were correlated with objective metrics to identify suitable metrics to use for the objective evaluations of different HDR video coding solutions. A few variants of PSNR, as well as SSIM, MSE, VIFP, and especially HDR-VDP-2 metric, have high correlation with the subjective scores.