Flat panel display characterization

Abstract

Over the last decade, consumer television sets have substantially increased in screen size, with screen diagonals up to 65-inch and beyond. At the same time, their thickness has decreased to only a few centimeters. Right from the start, this combination has been highly appreciated by consumers, resulting in a fast acceptance of flat-screen televisions in the consumer market. However, the visible light generation and modulation technologies in flat-screen displays differ considerably from those in conventional cathode-ray tubes. As a consequence, the rendered images on these displays may look different. To understand differences in perceived images, it seems obvious to ask consumers for their opinion. In practice, perception experiments with consumers are often complicated, time consuming, and expensive. To aid display designers in optimizing the image quality without conducting perception experiments, a framework for predicting image quality on the basis of technical display parameters has been proposed in literature. In this framework, technical display parameters need to be linked to physical display characteristics, i.e., things we can measure, which in turn need to be linked to things we perceive, i.e., the perceptual attributes. The final image quality judgment is based on a combination of all perceptual attributes. In the context of this framework, display engineers mainly focus on describing the physical display characteristics, whereas psychologists concentrate on evaluating the perceptual attributes and their relation to image quality. In this thesis, the missing link is addressed and psychophysical relations are established between three physical flat-screen display characteristics and their related perceptual attributes. The performance of LCDs under oblique viewing angles is characterized and a new definition for the viewing angle range is proposed. A model is developed to predict flicker visibility for scanning backlight LCDs. Finally, a methodology is provided to enable the characterization of the LCD's motion performance.