Regional Contrast Enhancement for Local Dimming Backlight on Small-sized Mobile Display

This paper presents smart regional contrast enhancement technique of partitioned image for local dimming backlight on small-sized mobile display to reach two goals. One is to save the power consumption, and the other to improve contrast ratio of display image. Recently new advanced method is proposed, named local dimming method, that backlight LED is positioned on backside of the display panel. So it is important to partition an image by sub blocks and then post-processing independantly. This means regional contrast enhancement. After partitioning, we compare the mean luminance(Y) value of each sub-block image with the one of original whole image. If some blocks have the mean value lower than the one of whole image, they are processed with the proposed method and others are bypassed. Simultaneously the information of the processed blocks are transferred to BLC(Backlight LED Controller). And then the supply current of each backlight LED is reduced to realize the contrast ratio enhancement and at the same time to power consumption reduction. In addition, we verify this proposed method is free from blocking artifacts.