Regional Histogramming for Flat Panel Display Brightness
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Solution Overview
Problem
Low-cost flat panel displays without light guides suffer from non-uniform brightness, leading to degraded image quality and contrast, which negatively impacts the user's viewing experience.
Innovation Solution
A method is proposed where each pixel is mapped to the brightness of illumination, with regional pixel gains calculated and applied on a per-pixel basis to compensate for non-uniform brightness, and power savings are achieved by reducing backlight intensity while maintaining image quality through histogram-based adjustments.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of manufacture
If light guides are not included to reduce cost, then manufacturing cost is reduced, but brightness uniformity deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the display panel into multiple regions, each with its own backlight unit and light guide structure. By localizing the light guide functions to specific regions rather than using a single comprehensive light guide, the system achieves acceptable brightness uniformity while reducing overall complexity and cost
Solution Approach 2:
The backlight system is segmented into multiple independent backlight units, each serving a specific region of the display. This segmentation allows each unit to be optimized independently and reduces the need for complex overall light distribution mechanisms
2Manufacturing precision
If backlight intensity is increased to improve image quality, then image quality is improved, but power consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
Different regions of the display are assigned different backlight intensity levels based on their specific illumination requirements. Regions that need higher brightness receive more intense backlighting, while other regions use lower intensity, thereby achieving good overall image quality while minimizing total power consumption
Solution Approach 2:
The backlight intensity is dynamically adjusted based on the displayed content and regional requirements. The system can vary the intensity of different backlight units independently, optimizing the balance between image quality and power consumption in real-time
Data Source
AI summary
A solution is proposed that performs global histogramming of pre-regionally-enhanced pixel values accounting for inter-regional illumination contributions to verify that over-saturation of an image is prevented. According to an embodiment, pixel values that have been regionally enhanced—that is, with applied gains calculated for the respective regions—are further added to illumination values corresponding to the pixel values, with the resultant summed pixel values being histogrammed again to determine the amount of over-saturated pixels. An over-abundance of over-saturated pixels results in a calculation of a global modifier applied to each pixel to reduce the number of over-saturated pixels below an acceptable threshold.