Dynamic correction of color appearance on mobile displays

Technological advances in mobile devices have made them attractive for many previously infeasible image synthesis applications. Mobile users may roam between a wide range of environmental lighting including dim theaters, lit offices, and sunlight. Viewing images in diverse lighting situations poses a challenge: while our eyes can adapt to environmental lighting, changes in lighting can affect the perceived hue, brightness contrast and colorfulness of colors on electronic displays or in print. Consequently, colors in displayed images may appear bleached or be perceived differently from one lighting scenario to another. If these adverse lighting effects are unmitigated, the fidelity of color reproduction could suffer and limit the use of mobile devices in sensitive applications such as medical imaging, visualization, and watching movies. Many mobile devices currently include simple compensation schemes, which adjust their display’s brightness in response to the environmental illumination sensed by built-in light sensors. These displays compensate for brightness but neglect the changes in perceived color and contrast caused by environmental lighting. We propose a novel technique to dynamically compensate for changes in color, colorfulness, and hue as mobile users roam. Our adaptation technique is based on the iCam06 color appearance model and uses the mobile device’s sensor to continuously sample and feed back environmental lighting information.