Color shifts at different viewing eccentricities on flat-panel rear projection displays in steps of perceptibility threshold units

Abstract

Nearly all-flat panel video display monitors have luminance and color variations as the angle of view vary from the monitor’s perpendicular. The objective of this study was to measure the shift in hue and luminance of a simulated tiled monitor display at different viewing angles. The perceptibility experiment was carried out using three reference colors and 12 vectors heading towards the blue-green region of the L^∗a^∗b^∗ color space. The reference colors used were white, skin-tone, and green. A uniform reference color was presented in three of the four quadrants on a CRT monitor and one quadrant changed color in the direction of the sampled vector. An adaptive, four alternate forced choice procedure was employed to determine thresholds for each of the three reference colors. Across the three reference colors, the thresholds were at least 20% lower than the conventional one ΔE_L^∗_a^∗_b^∗ unit used for calibrating monitors. Color difference thresholds were lowest for the blue-green region of the color space. Our results suggest that a one ΔE_L^∗_a^∗_b^∗ uniformity criterion typically used for calibrating monitors is too lenient for tiled displays.

Keywords:

• perceptibility color threshold
• viewing angle
• flat-panel display
• L^∗a^∗b^∗ color space
• color shift
• color uniformity

Acknowledgements

This work was upported in part by Ontario Centres of Excellence and MITACS grant to V.L. and Christie Digital Inc., Ontario, Canada. This work was done while the first author (M.R.) was at the University of Waterloo. Author V.L. is also affiliated with the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI-48109, USA.