Dithering artifacts in liquid crystal displays and analytic solution to avoid them

Dithering is a bit-extension technique that has been used in various areas of gamma correction, picture quality improvement, viewing angle enhancement, high dynamic range (HDR) liquid crystal display (LCD) televisions. This technology generates intermediate levels between neighboring grays by displaying the neighboring grays according to predefined data sequence of pixels. However, the predefined data arrangement can cause some artifacts such as flicker, vertical and horizontal line artifacts. This paper reports dithering artifacts on LCD screens for the first time in the literature. We analyze why the artifacts take place and propose new dithering data arrangements to avoid the artifacts by taking account of polarities of pixels.