Real-time SDR to HDR video conversion using Quasar

The conversion from low-dynamic range video to high dynamic range content that can be displayed on, e.g., high dynamic range TVs, faces several obstacles: dealing with artifacts such as ‘ghost’ and ‘halo’ images, recognizing bright objects in dark environments, converting light and dark settings in a visually distinct way and carrying out all of these calculations in real-time on a GPU. Existing software solutions struggle with these problems and are unable to achieve the required quality in the end result.

By automatically handling the mapping from algorithm to GPU, Quasar allows application specialists to focus on the application at hand, focusing on the quality of the algorithms rather than hardware specific details. At the same time the algorithm can be tested on high resolution datasets and in realtime. This led to the development of a SDR->HDR conversion algorithm, from which the result can be inspected below.

Left – visual artifacts occurring during traditional conversion to HDR. Right – processing result of software developed using Quasar

Read more in the imec magazine.

See also our previous blog post from February, with a video example.