Skin-color correction method based on hue template mapping for wide color gamut liquid crystal display devices

Abstract

The development of wide color gamut (WCG) liquid crystal display (LCD) plays an important role in the high-quality television (TV) field. Nowadays, people want their TV or display devices to have the capability of showing vivid colors while keeping skin colors as natural as they remember. Therefore, it is necessary to develop color-correction technologies for WCG LCD system. A new color-correction method named "natural skin-color mapping algorithm" (NSCMA) for WCG LCD is proposed in this study. It can solve the skin-color contour problem in color-corrected images with simple skin-color detection. Its development is based on the concepts of performing color mapping between source hue colors and target hue colors on each hue page. The polynomial regression is also applied to calculate the color mapping conversion matrices. Two color mapping factors called template-size factor and tone-compression factor are designed in NSCMA. The template-size factor is used to adjust target template sizes adequately. The tone-compression factor is designed to control the degrees of image enhancement. For facial skin-color pictures, the appropriate settings of template-size factor and tone-compression factor will get suitable color image rendering on the WCG LCD. It is demonstrated that the WCG LCD can be corrected to show vivid color pictures and keep facial skin colors as natural as possible when the proposed NSCMA is performed. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.