Saliency aware display power management

Abstract

In this paper, a bio-inspired technique of finding the regions of highest visual importance within an image is proposed for reducing power consumption in modern liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that utilize a 2D light-emitting diode (LED) backlighting system. The conspicuity map generated from this neuromorphic saliency model, along with an adaptive dimming method, is applied to the backlighting array to reduce the luminance of regions of least interest as perceived by a human viewer. Corresponding image compensation is applied to the saliency modulated image to minimize distortion and retain the original image quality. Experimental results shows average 65% power can be saved when the original display system is integrated with a low-overhead real-time hardware implementation of the saliency model.