A flat panel display device includes a face plate made of a transparent material, a back plate positioned parallel to the face plate, and a wall member extending between the face plate and back plate to define an airtight housing. An anode is provided on a inner surface of the face plate, a fluorescent layer is provided in association with the anode, and a cathode is provided in association with an inner surface of the back plate. A plurality of struts, made of an electrically conductive screen printed powdery material, are tightly held between the back plate and the face plate, such that an electric charge accumulated between the anode and cathode is discharged by a leakage current flowing through the struts.

Flat panel display device

The perceived resolution of matrix displays increases when the relative position of the color subpixels is taken into account. Subpixel-rendering algorithms are being used to convert an input image to subpixel-corrected display images. This paper deals with the consequences of the subpixel structure and the theoretical background of the resolution gain. We will show that this theory allows a low-cost implementation in an image scaler. This leads to high flexibility, allowing different subpixel arrangements and a simple control over the trade-off between perceived resolution and color errors.

Subpixel image scaling for color‐matrix displays

We study the dual problem of image super-resolution (SR), which we term image compact-resolution (CR). Opposite to image SR that hallucinates a visually plausible high-resolution image given a low-resolution input, image CR provides a low-resolution version of a high-resolution image, such that the low-resolution version is both visually pleasing and as informative as possible compared to the high-resolution image. We propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) for image CR, namely, CNN-CR, inspired by the great success of CNN for image SR. Specifically, we translate the requirements of image CR into operable optimization targets for training CNN-CR: the visual quality of the compact resolved image is ensured by constraining its difference from a naively downsampled version and the information loss of image CR is measured by upsampling/super-resolving the compact-resolved image and comparing that to the original image. Accordingly, CNN-CR can be trained either separately or jointly with a CNN for image SR. We explore different training strategies as well as different network structures for CNN-CR. Our experimental results show that the proposed CNN-CR clearly outperforms simple bicubic downsampling and achieves on average 2.25 dB improvement in terms of the reconstruction quality on a large collection of natural images. We further investigate two applications of image CR, i.e., low-bit-rate image compression and image retargeting. Experimental results show that the proposed CNN-CR helps achieve significant bits saving than High Efficiency Video Coding when applied to image compression and produce visually pleasing results when applied to image retargeting.

Learning a Convolutional Neural Network for Image Compact-Resolution

A figure displaying device for generating a brightness signal which corresponds to a figure information to be displayed as well as for generating a brightness modulation signal which varies within a predetermined first region on a display screen The device also generates a frequency characteristic control signal which varies within a predetermined second region on the display screen Furthermore, the display is able to subject the brightness signal to a brightness modulation in accordance with the signal from the modulator generator with the brightness signal being controlled by the frequency characteristics control signal The resultant figure displayed on a monitor is based on a modulation signal obtained through the modulation generator and the frequency characteristics control generator

Figure displaying device

Subpixel-based down-sampling is a method that can potentially improve apparent resolution of a down-scaled image on LCD by controlling individual subpixels rather than pixels. However, the increased luminance resolution comes at price of chrominance distortion. A major challenge is to suppress color fringing artifacts while maintaining sharpness. We propose a new subpixel-based down-sampling pattern called diagonal direct subpixel-based down-sampling (DDSD) for which we design a 2-D image reconstruction model. Then, we formulate subpixel-based down-sampling as a MMSE problem and derive the optimal solution called minimum mean square error for subpixel-based down-sampling (MMSE-SD). Unfortunately, straightforward implementation of MMSE-SD is computational intensive. We thus prove that the solution is equivalent to a 2-D linear filter followed by DDSD, which is much simpler. We further reduce computational complexity using a small k × k filter to approximate the much larger MMSE-SD filter. To compare the performances of pixel and subpixel-based down-sampling methods, we propose two novel objective measures: normalized l1 high frequency energy for apparent luminance sharpness and PSNRU(V) for chrominance distortion. Simulation results show that both MMSE-SD and MMSE-SD(k) can give sharper images compared with conventional down-sampling methods, with little color fringing artifacts.

Novel 2-D MMSE Subpixel-Based Image Down-Sampling

We have developed two compact flat TV sets and a full-color prototype model, using thin matrix dc gas-discharge panels of novel structure. The display panel is ¼ in thick, has a 7-in diagonal picture size, and contains 60 000 elements. The monochrome version has a peak luminance of 25 fL, a contrast ratio of 40:1, and 32 digitized gray levels, while the full-color set has a luminance of 5 fL, a 20:1 contrast ratio, and 48 levels. Luminance control is performed by varying the magnitude as well as the duration of the display current. All signals are digitized and all circuits consist of TTL IC's, with the exception of the drive transistors. We have constructed two types of experimental monochrome model sets: one for desk-top use packaged in a 300 × 350 × 80 mm housing which includes tuner, A/D converter, and all TV circuits with the exception of a power supply, the other for wall hanging. A full-color flat display panel has also been developed using a similar panel structure and circuitry.

Y. Amano

Papers

A flat-panel TV display system in monochrome and color