Light Steering Projection Systems and Attributes for HDR Displays

New light steering projectors in cinema form images by moving light away from dark regions into bright areas of an image. In these systems, the peak luminance of small features can far exceed full screen white luminance. In traditional projectors where light is filtered or blocked in order to give shades of gray (or colors), the peak luminance is fixed. The luminance of chromatic features benefit in the same way as white features, and chromatic image details can be reproduced at high brightness leading to a much wider overall color gamut coverage than previously possible. Projectors of this capability are desired by the creative community to aid in and enhance storytelling. Furthermore, reduced light source power requirements of light steering projectors provide additional economic and environmental benefits. While the dependency of peak luminance level on (bright) image feature size is new in the digital cinema space, display technologies with identical characteristics such as OLED, LED LCD and Plasma TVs are well established in the home. Similarly, direct view LED walls are popular in events, advertising and architectural markets. To enable consistent color reproduction across devices in today’s content production pipelines, models that describe modern projectors and display attributes need to evolve together with HDR standards and available metadata. This paper is a first step towards rethinking legacy display descriptors such as contrast, peak luminance and color primaries in light of new display technology. We first summarize recent progress in the field of light steering projectors in cinema and then, based on new projector and existing display characteristics propose the inclusion of two simple display attributes: Maximum Average Luminance and Peak (Color) Primary Luminance. We show that the proposed attributes allow a better prediction of content reproducibility on HDR displays. To validate this assertion, we test professional content on a commercial HDR television system and show that the proposed attributes better predict if a pixel value lies inside the capabilities of a display or not.