This diploma thesis focuses on the High-level synthesis (HLS). The first part deals with theoretical details and methods that are used in HLS tools. This is followed by a description of the synthesis tool Vivado HLS which will be used for implementation of an application. In the second part is briefly introduced high dynamic range images (HDR) and tone mapping. The third part is dedicated to design and implementation of the aplication which implements tone mapping methods in HDR images. This methods are implemented in Vivado HLS and language C++. This application is based on platform Xilinx Zynq and it uses multiexposure camera for capturing HDR images. Images are transmitted to FPGA for tone mapping processing.

The goal of this thesis is to improve graphical user interface of Tone Mapping Studio(TMS) program. This program is being developed on the Faculty of Information Technology(FIT), Brno University of Technology (BUT) by doc. Ing. Martin Čadík, PhD. The current program is using framework Qt3 , which is old and not compatible with modern libraries. This program has to be rewritten to support current version Qt5. I will analyze other programs in the area of working with High Dynamic Range (HDR) images and video. Changes for improving the interface will be proposed and UX tests will be done. Second part will consist of comparing plug-ins for converting images to grayscale that already exists in TMS.

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High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is a rapidly growing field in computer graphics and image processing. It allows capture, storage, processing, and display of photographic information within a scene-referred framework. The HDR imaging pipeline consists of the major steps an HDR image is expected to go through from capture to display. It involves various techniques to create HDR images, pixel encodings and file formats for storage, tone mapping for display on conventional display devices and direct display on HDR capable screens. Each of these stages have important open problems, which need to be addressed for a smoother transition to an HDR imaging pipeline. We addressed some of these important problems such as noise reduction in HDR imagery, preservation of color appearance, validation of tone mapping operators, and image display on HDR monitors. The aim of this thesis is thus, to present our findings and describe the research we have conducted within the framework of optimizing the HDR imaging pipeline.

Cette thèse se situe à l’interface de deux des sujets de recherche du LEPSi8S, la perception et la réalité virtuelle, appliqués aux transports routiers. L’objectif de la thèse est d’améliorer l’état de l’art concernant le rendu des images de synthèse pour les simulateurs de conduite. L’axe privilégié est le réalisme perceptif des images. L’approche retenue propose un mode de rendu High Dynamic Range, qui permet de générer une image en luminance. La technique proposée permet de réutiliser des environnements virtuels classiques, avec un minimum d’informations supplémentaires concernant les sources lumineuses. Les textures et matériaux existants sont utilisés pour un rendu aussi proche physiquement de la réalité que possible. Ensuite, l’image est traitée avec un opérateur de reproduction de tons, qui compresse la dynamique pour tenir compte des limites liées au dispositif d’affichage, tout en respectant autant que possible un réalisme perceptif du rendu. L’opérateur a été choisi de façon à ce qu’il soit adapté à la simulation de conduite, notamment pour les cas extrêmes (nuit, éblouissement, soleil rasant). Une simulation de l’éblouissement a également été implémentée. L’ensemble du rendu est temps réel, et a été intégré dans la boucle visuelle les simulateurs de conduite du LEPSiS. Enfin, des comparaisons réel-virtuel ont permis de montrer la qualité du rendu HDR obtenu. Des expérimentations avec sujets, sur des photographies (avec une référence réelle) et sur des vidéos, ont de plus montré les meilleures performances d’un opérateur doté d’un modèle visuel humain pour la simulation de conduite, notamment par sa capacité à s’adapter temporellement aux variations de luminance. / The LEPSiS is leading applied research on the transportation field. This PhD addresses perception and virtual reality, two research topics at the LEPSiS. The objective of my PhD was to improve the state of the art of the computer graphic image rendering for driving simulator applications. The main issue was the perceptual realism of the images, notably in high dynamic range conditions (night, glare). The proposed approach puts forward a High Dynamic Range mode, allowing us to render images in luminance.We use classic virtual environments, with small additional information about the light sources. The textures and materials are used for a rendering as close as possible to physical reality. Then, the image is processed by a tone mapping operator, which compresses the luminance dynamic, taking into account the limited range of the display device and the perceptual realism of the rendering. The chosen tone mapping is adapted to driving simulations, and especially to extreme situations (night, skimming sun). A glare simulation was also added. The entire rendering is real time, and is now included in the driving simulators of the LEPSiS. Lastly, real-virtual comparisons assessed the quality of the obtained HDR rendering. Moreover, two psycho-visual experiments with subjects, on photographs (with a real reference) and on video (without reference), showed the relevance of a tone mapping with a human visual model, including temporal adaptation to changing luminance, for driving simulations.

Tone mapping operators aim to compress high dynamic range (HDR) images to low dynamic range ones so as to visualize HDR images on standard displays. Most existing works were demonstrated on specific examples without being thoroughly tested on well-established and subject-validated image quality assessment models. A recent tone mapped image quality index (TMQI) made the first attempt on objective quality assessment of tone mapped images. TMQI consists of two fundamental building blocks: structural fidelity and statistical naturalness. In this thesis, we propose an enhanced tone mapped image quality index (eTMQI) by 1) constructing an improved nonlinear mapping function to better account for the local contrast visibility of HDR images and 2) developing an image dependent statistical naturalness model to quantify the unnaturalness of tone mapped images based on a subjective study. Experiments show that the modified structural fidelity and statistical naturalness terms in eTMQI better correlate with subjective quality evaluations. Furthermore, we propose an iterative optimization algorithm for tone mapping. The advantages of this algorithm are twofold: 1) eTMQI and TMQI can be compared in a more straightforward way; 2) better quality tone mapped images can be automatically generated by using eTMQI as the optimization goal. Numerical and subjective experiments demonstrate that eTMQI is a superior objective quality assessment metric for tone mapped images and consistently outperforms TMQI.

Orientador: Prof. Dr. André Guilherme Ribeiro Balan / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal do ABC, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação, 2014. / A fotografia é uma atividade em grande crescimento e desenvolvimento, não apenas entre prossionais, mas também para a sociedade como um todo. Espera-se que a imagem tomada de uma determinada cena seja tão real quanto possível, e, por sua vez, que os equipamentos existentes sejam capazes de obter e visualizar essas imagens, o mais el possível da cena que está sendo registrada. O trabalho desenvolvido e apresentado nesta dissertação busca fazer o levantamento e estudo de técnicas que manipulem imagens HDR (High Dynamic Range), ou seja, imagens que possuem grande quantidade de informações da cena que representa, a m de torná-las visualizáveis com todos os detalhes nela contidos de maneira mais real possível ou de forma artística. A manipulação necessária para tais imagens é realizada por meio do mapeamento das imagens HDR para imagens LDR (Low Dynamic Range). O mapeamento das imagens HDR pode ser realizado com operadores de tone mapping e, como abordado nesta dissertação, com a decomposição multiescala. A decomposição multiescala oferece resultados de alta qualidade, tornando se um método de grande importância para o área de Processamento de Imagens, pelo fato de dividir a imagem de entrada em camadas e manipulá-las individualmente, para depois restaurá-la. Neste trabalho são avaliados métodos de ltragem não linear e operadores de tone mapping que melhor se adequam ao processo de decomposição multiescala e ao método de decomposição multiescala juntamente com a aplicação de compressão das camadas obtidas no processo de decomposição, a m de obter imagens reais com aprimoramento e destaque de seus detalhes. Adicionalmente, é proposto um novo operador de tone mapping local baseado no operador local de Reinhard, com as mesmas características e, com ajuste de parâmetro, que obtém resultados mais robustos que o operador local de Reinhard. Com isso, novos parâmetros ou métodos são propostos para aumentar a qualidade das imagens obtidas. / Photography is an activity in huge growth and development, not only among professionals, but also to society as a whole. It is expected that an image taken of a certain scene be as real as possible and, for its turn, that the existing equipment could obtain and visualize those images as accurately as the scene being recorded. The work developed and presented in this dissertation seeks to do a survey and a study of techniques which manipulate HDR (High Dynamic Range) images, in other words, of images that have large amount of information of a scene that is represented, in order to turn the images viewable with all the details they have as accurately as possible or in an artistic format. The required manipulation of those images is held by the mapping from HDR images to LDR (Low Dynamic Range) images. The HDR images mapping can be done with tone mapping operators and, as discussed in this dissertation, with the multiscale decomposition.The multiscale decomposition oers high quality results, being a method of great relevance to the Image Processing area, by the fact that it divides the input image in layers and manipulates these individually, to restore the image, after that. In this work, the non-linear lter methods and tone mapping operators that best t the multiscale decomposition process and multiscale decomposition method along with the application of layers compression, are evaluated to obtain real images with improvement and details highlighted. Besides that, a new tone mapping operator is proposed, based on the Reinhard local operator, with the same characteristics and with parameter settings, which gives more robust results than the Reinhard local operator. Thus, new parameters or methods are suggested to increase the obtained image quality.

Orientador: Prof. Dr. André Guilherme Ribeiro Balan / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal do ABC, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação, 2017. / Uma cena real possui uma grande variação de contraste que, quando vista pelo olho humano, resulta em detalhes que sensores de câmeras digitais comuns não conseguem capturar. Isso ocorre devido às limitações dos dispositivos para obter e exibir diferentes valores de cor. Imagens HDR (High Dynamic Range), por sua vez, são representações que conseguem reproduzir essa amplitude de valores. Para gerar e exibir imagens HDR, diante das limitações dos dispositivos, é necessário trabalhar em um domínio de menor alcance, com imagens LDR (Low Dynamic Range). Os algoritmos que mapeiam os valores entre os domínios são chamadas de operadores de tone-mapping. Apenas a aplicação de tone-mapping não gera resultados de alta qualidade, sendo necessárias técnicas de redução de ruídos e decomposição de imagem para tal. Essas técnicas implicam um alto custo computacional e demandam muito tempo quando executados na CPU. Por outro lado, o processamento na GPU oferece um paralelismo natural, por viabilizar operações a serem aplicadas a todos os pixels, simultaneamente. Uma das maneiras de programar essas operações na GPU é através do uso de shaders gráficos, alterando a forma que os pixels da imagem são reproduzidos. Com o constante crescimento da utilização de dispositivos móveis, um tema recorrente é o desempenho e a viabilidade de aplicações de alta performance em tais dispositivos, que atualmente, na maioria dos casos, possuem em sua arquitetura uma GPU programável. Nesse trabalho, desenvolvemos shaders gráficos OpenGL para processar operações de tonemapping, bem como a decomposição multiescala de imagens utilizando filtros não lineares importantes e modernos, a fim de preservar a maioria dos detalhes das imagens. Isso gera resultados mais nítidos quando comparados com técnicas que aplicam os operadores de tone-mapping diretamente nas imagens. Por outro lado, o processamento em GPU representa uma enorme melhoria de velocidade em relação ao processamento da CPU. A aplicação que desenvolvemos é multiplataforma para que ele possa ser executado em desktops e dispositivos móveis. Utilizamos a aplicação para avaliar o desempenho de diferentes operadores de tone-mapping e diferentes filtros de imagem não lineares para executar a decomposição de imagens em vários níveis. / A typical scene may have a highly nonuniform illumination that common digital camera sensors are currently not able to deal with, as well as typical screen monitors. A High Dynamic Range image (HDR) is an image model capable to store much larger illumination range than regular models, what is more similar to our human system view. To generate and display HDR images, given the limitations of the devices (cameras and screen monitors), it is necessary to work in a domain with smaller range, called LDR images (Low Dynamic Range). The algorithms that map HDR images to LDR images are called tone-mapping operators. These algorithms, when operating on very high resolution HDR images, demand very high computational effort that CPU are also not currently capable to deal with. On the other hand, GPU offers a natural parallelism by enabling operations to be applied on thousands of pixels simultaneously. One way to program these operations on the GPU is through the use of graphics shaders, directly changing a graphical pipeline that reproduce pixels of the image, such as OpenGL pipeline. Nowadays, mobile devices are also highly available devices that can have powerful GPUs. Hence, an important research subject is to access the viability of using such devices on HDR image processing and tone-mapping. In this work, we develop OpenGL graphic shaders to process tone-mapping operation as well as image multiscale decomposition using important and modern nonlinear image filters, in order to preserve the most of the images details. This generates sharper results when compared to techniques that directly apply tone-mapping operators on the images. On the other hand, GPU processing represents a huge speed improvement over CPU processing. The application we develop is multiplatform so it can run on desktops and mobile devices. We used it to evaluate the performance of different tone-mapping operators and different nonlinear image filters to perform image multiscale decomposition.

As real time visualizations become more realistic it also becomes more important to simulate the perceptual effects of the human visual system. Such effects include the response to varying illumination, glare and differences between photopic and scotopic vision. This thesis evaluates several different tone mapping methods to allow a greater dynamic range to be used in real time visualisations. Several tone mapping methods have been implemented in the Avalanche Game Engine and evaluated using a small test group. To increase immersion in the visualization several filters aimed to simulate perceptual effects has also been implemented. The primary goal of these filters is to simulate scotopic vision. The tests showed that two tone mapping methods would be suitable for the environment used in the tests. The S-curve tone mapping method gave the best result while the Mean Value method gave good results while being the simplest to implement and the cheapest. The test subjects agreed that the simulation of scotopic vision enhanced the immersion in a visualization. The primary difficulties in this work has been lack of dynamic range in the input images and the challenges in coding real time graphics using a graphics processing unit.