Optimized contrast reduction for crosstalk cancellation in 3D displays

Subtractive crosstalk cancelation is an effective way to reduce the appearance of ghosting in 3D displays. However, effective cancelation requires the black level of the input images to be raised above zero, which reduces the image contrast and visual quality. Previous methods for selecting the raised black level do not consider the image content; they are either based on the worst case or they do not guarantee complete crosstalk cancelation. Previous methods also scale the red, green and blue channels independently, which results in images with washed out colors. This paper provides two contributions; first we derive the minimum amount that the black level has to be raised when using linear scaling in RGB space to ensure crosstalk can be fully cancelled out for a particular image. Second we propose that instead of scaling the images in RGB space, to scale the luma channel in YCbCr color space while keeping the chroma values constant to better preserve color. We also derive the minimum amount that the luma range has to be compressed to ensure that crosstalk can be fully canceled out. Experimental results show that our methods produce images with better color and contrast compared to scaling the RGB channels based on the worst case, while still guaranteeing crosstalk can be fully canceled out.