Spring Tech

White Paper: Cobalt Digital Engineering Dives Deep Into Compressed HDR

Cobalt Digital’s engineering team has penned a recent white paper entitled Bit-Rate Evaluation of Compressed HDR Using SL-HDR.

Video encoders and decoders are usually transparent to whether or not their input signal is High Dynamic Range (HDR). Encoders and decoders simply transport the video samples. When it comes to transporting HDR, one has the choice of simply transporting HDR in its native format, or using one of the metadata formats. One such format is SL-HDR1, where the signal is converted to SDR and transmitted with metadata that allows a receiver to reconstruct the HDR signal. This paper focuses on the required bit rates to produce a final HDR signal over a compressed link for a given quality.

Cobalt compares encoding SMPTE-2084 PQ HDR signals directly versus using SL-HDR1 to generate an SDR signal plus dynamic metadata. The comparison is done objectively by comparing the PSNR of the decoded signal. The SMPTE-2084 HDR signal is used as a reference at a fixed bit rate, and the bit rate of the SL-HDR1 encoded signal is varied until it matches the PSNR, over a range of source material. The evaluation is done for both AVC (H.264) and HEVC (H.265). This is similar to the work described in [1], with different content and metrics.

For the full white paper, click HERE.

For more information on Cobalt Digital, please contact Chris Shaw at [email protected].

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