Watermarking for HDR image robust to tone mapping

High Dynamic Range (HDR) images have been widely applied in daily applications. However, HDR image is a special format, which needs to be pre-processed known as tone mapping operators for display. Since the visual quality of HDR images is very sensitive to luminance value variations, conventional watermarking methods for low dynamic range (LDR) images are not suitable and may even cause catastrophic visible distortion. Currently, few methods for HDR image watermarking are proposed. In this paper, two watermarking schemes targeting HDR images are proposed, which are based on μ-Law and bilateral filtering, respectively. Both of the subjective and objective qualities of watermarked images are greatly improved by the two methods. What's more, these proposed methods also show higher robustness against tone mapping operations.