Low-energy RGB color approximation for digital LCD interfaces

The limited resolution capabilities of color displays, coupled with the limited perceptual resolution of the human eye has been widely exploited to reduce the actual number of colors that are simultaneously displayed. In this work, we propose a color approximation technique that is orthogonal to traditional, color simplification schemes, and targets the reduction of the energy required for the transmission of color information on digital LCD interfaces. Our approach leverages the serial nature of the transmission so as to approximate RGB pixel values with suitable codes that minimize the number of transitions on the LCD bus, for a given tolerated image quality level. Application of this scheme on a set of benchmark images shows average savings from 60% to 75%, depending on the image quality