Backward Compatible HDR Video Compression System

A new video compression scheme for High Dynamic Range (HDR) contents is presented. It is assumed that both Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) and HDR devices coexist in the ecosystem, and the scheme is constructed to ensure backward compatibility such that a single video stream carries both the original HDR video and an automatically generated SDR version of this video without noticeable overhead relatively to the distribution of the HDR video only. Compression performance are shown to be solidly improved compared to the conservative and non-backward-compatible approach using the HEVC Main10 codec and the Perceptual Quantizer (PQ) Electro-Optical Transfer Function (OETF) as non-linearity.