Image Enhancement for Reducing LCD Backlight Power Based on Human Visual Characteristics

One common way to reduce power consumption of display devices is to reduce the liquid crystal displays (LCD) backlight intensity since the main light source of LCD consumes 20~50% of the total system power. In this paper, we propose a novel method of reducing LCD backlight power which maximizes the power reduction ratio and minimizes the visual image quality degradation based on the human visual system (HVS). The proposed method uses histogram to minimize the number of clipped pixels and keep the perceptual quality and the characteristics of image. In contrast to previous approach, the proposed method uses no look-up table and preserves the hue values and the perceptual white brightness. Experimental results show that 41.35% of backlight power is reduced on average without severe perceptual distortion.