A Burn-in Potential Region Detection Method for the OLED panel displays

Organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays consist of organic compounds that emit light in response to electric current. OLED displays have been widely adopted to various multimedia devices due to their excellent performance. However, when a high luminance is repeatedly output in a specific region, the pixels within the region are seriously degraded as compared with the surrounding area. Such cumulative non-uniform use of pixels can cause screen burn-in, which is a noticeable color drift on the OLED display over time. In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect a burn-in potential region (BPR) as a preprocessing to prevent the burnin problem. In the proposed method, the lifetime of each pixel of the OLED display is estimated by accumulating the amount of consumed charge. If the discoloration due to the difference in the remaining lifetime between some particular pixels being outputting the high luminance and their surrounding pixels being outputting the low luminance is close to the user’s perceptible level, those particular pixels are selected as the BPR. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method detects the BPR with superior effectiveness compared with the conventional method.