SHF: Medium: Collaborative Research: System Solutions for Context-aware and Energy-Efficient Mobile Displays

William Marsh Rice University, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are intended for usage under demanding physical conditions. As a result, their displays face two unique challenges. First, contextual factors, including the viewing angle, ambient lighting, and unwanted shaking of the device, tend to distort the perceived display content. Moreover, the display is known to be among the largest power consumers on a state-of-the-art mobile device. The goal of this project is to provide the algorithmic foundation as well as software and hardware solutions required for addressing these two challenges. As a close collaboration between Rice University and the University of Southern California, the project targets the following scientific contributions. (1) Sensor-based inference of viewing context that efficiently obtains the viewing context from sensors available in modern mobile devices. (2) Compensation for contextual factors that transforms the display content to produce an improved user perception in terms of fidelity and/or usability. (3) Supply voltage scaling and color/image transformations that modify the display data to significantly reduce the power consumption of mobile OLED displays under human perceptual constraints. By improving the performance and energy efficiency of mobile displays under challenging viewing conditions, this project will extend the reach of mobile computing beyond its current levels, therefore, having a far-reaching socio-economic impact. Through the NSF/FDA Scholar-in-Residence (SIR) program, graduate students working on this project will visit the US FDA and collaborate with FDA researchers to apply research results to medical imaging problems with mobile displays. The multidisciplinary nature of the proposed research will invite new research problems in system architecture and circuit design, human-computer interaction, image processing, and photometry. It will also provide a multidisciplinary platform for undergraduate and graduate education and research.