Color Distortion-Aware Error Control for Backlight Dimming

This paper proposes a new backlight dimming algorithm based on color distortion-aware error control. Conventional backlight dimming based on an error control algorithm simply determines a clipping point by considering the clipping error where the gray levels of pixels are saturated at the highest displayable gray level, thereby producing an image with color distortion. In contrast, the proposed algorithm estimates color distortion generated by the clipping error in advance after analyzing the color ratio of an input image. Next, the proposed algorithm determines the optimal clipping point to ensure that the image quality is as similar as possible to the objective target image quality. According to the simulation results, the proposed algorithm reduced the average color distortion significantly by up to 47.530% compared with the conventional algorithm, while it preserved the objective image quality at almost the same level as the conventional algorithm. In addition, the proposed algorithm reduced the average computational time by up to 6.512 μs (75.256% reduction) compared with the conventional algorithm.