Implementation of High Dynamic Range Image Processing Module as a Part of Lighting Simulation Software System
Abstract:
This article describes approaches to implementation of software module for processing of high dynamic range images, as a part of lighting simulation and photorealistic computer graphics software. Lighting simulation software requiresits own image processing application because functionality of existing ones usually is not enough for lighting simulation analysis purposes. Processing and analysis of lighting simulation results usually requires the certain functionality that is absent in many image processing programs. The article describes an application developed by us which contains such functionality related to lighting simulation. At first, it is a dynamic range compression function for displaying images on computer monitors. Besides this, our application includes additional functionality for improving image quality, such as forced desaturation of brightest highlights on the images, and also image filtering for decreasing noise caused by stochastic methods used in simulation. For simulation result analysis it is required to transfer additional data (besides image itself) to the processing module. Such layer-based data structure of high dynamic range image files generated by lighting simulations software is described.
Keywords:
high dynamic range images, dynamic range compression, image filtering, image color correction, graphical file format data structure
