DTM: dynamic tone mapping for backlight scaling

This paper proposes an approach for pixel transformation of the displayed image to increase the potential energy saving of the backlight scaling method. The proposed approach takes advantage of human visual system characteristics and tries to minimize distortion between the perceived brightness values of the individual pixels in the original image and those of the backlight-scaled image. This is in contrast to previous backlight scaling approaches which simply match the luminance values of the individual pixels in the original and backlight-scaled images. Moreover, the proposed dynamic backlight scaling approach, which is based on tone mapping, is amenable to highly efficient hardware realization because it does not need information about the histogram of the displayed image. Experimental results show that the dynamic tone mapping for backlight scaling method results in about 35% power saving with an effective distortion rate of 5% and 55% power saving for a 20% distortion rate.