Too Many Pixels to Perceive: Subpixel Shuto for Display Energy Reduction on OLED Smartphones Zhisheng Yan Chang Wen Chen Georgia State University State University of New York at Bualo ABSTRACT experience in regular use cases. Instead, it will even drain much Organic lightemitting diode (OLED) has been widely recognized more display power and degrade user experience [27]. as the nextgeneration mobile display. Recently, smartphone manu In particular, most manufacturers have pushed up their OLED facturers have been pushing up the pixel density of OLED display. smartphone resolution to 2560 ×1440 (2K), which boosts the display Unfortunately, such an eort does not necessarily improve the pixel density to more than 500 Pixels Per Inch (PPI ). Despite these everyday viewing because of the limitation in human visual acuity. impressive statistics, a wellknown issue is that users are unlikely Instead, high pixel density OLED can drain the battery power even to dierentiate such subtle content detail in normal usage because more quickly since the power dissipation of OLED is determined of the limitation in human visual acuity. According to an image by the number of displayed pixels and their RGB values, or sub viewing study [ 26 ], one half of the subjects identied a 577PPI pixels. This paper presents a new design dimension to remedy this OLED phone as a better display while the other half preferred a prevailing issue by leveraging the intuition that shutting o redun samesize phone with 471 PPI. The reason for this controversy is dant subpixels of the display content on OLED can reduce power that the extremely high PPI makes each pixel shrunk to an indis consumption without impacting viewing perception. We introduce tinguishable size and thereby similar image detail are observed on ShutPix , a powersaving display system for OLED smartphones both displays. In fact, ∼300 PPI has been recognized as the golden that can optimally shut o the redundant subpixels before the con number for users with normal vision in everyday viewing [3] and tent is displayed. Inspired by the motivational studies, ShutPix is are still adopted by a few models (e.g., iPhone 7) (Section 2). empowered by a suite of designs based on visual acuity, human More importantly, the growing OLED pixel density will even perception, and content redundancy. Experimental results show mitigate the display energy eciency. This is because the display that ShutPix can, on average, reduce 21% of display power and 15% power of selfemissive OLED is determined by the total number of of system power without degrading user viewing experience. displayed pixels as well as the values of their corresponding RGB components [ 11 ], i.e., subpixels . Under the same display size, higher CCS CONCEPTS pixel density will denitely consume more battery power. Based on our own measurement, an OLED smartphone of 518 PPI causes up • Information systems → Mobile information systems ; to 48% more perinch display power than a device of 403 PPI and KEYWORDS its display power can take up 58% of the system power (Section 3). OLED display; energy reduction; smartphones The excessive amounts of pixels and the resulting OLED energy ACM Reference format: has not been studied systematically. In this paper, we bridge this Zhisheng Yan and Chang Wen Chen. 2017. Too Many Pixels to Perceive: gap by leveraging the intuition that shutting o redundant tiny sub Subpixel Shuto for Display Energy Reduction on OLED Smartphones. In pixels of the display content on OLED can save battery power, but Proceedings of MM’17, Mountain View, CA, Oct., 9 pages. will not impact the user perception. We aim at maximally shutting DOI: 10.1145/3123266.3123344 o subpixels on highPPI OLED smartphones. It is important to note that unlike traditional color transform schemes for powersaving 1 INTRODUCTION OLED that treat every RGB subpixels necessary and netune their Organic lightemitting diode (OLED) is recently emerging on most signal magnitude [6, 8, 10 , 15 , 17 , 34 ], subpixel shuto creates a newly released smartphones. While the energy eciency of OLED new research direction in identifying the redundant subpixels and hardware is advanced slowly, there appears an increasing resolu thus reducing the spatial frequency of the display signal. It is the tion and pixel density on OLED smartphones. This eort has been decreasing number of redundant subpixels that brings the power arguably marketed for providing sharper multimedia content on reduction. From this perspective, the redundant subpixel shuto is mobile display. Unfortunately, except for virtual reality (VR) ap complementary to existing color transform schemes. plications with unusual viewing distance [ 24 ], such an upsurge in However, turning this promising strategy into practice requires pixel density does not necessarily improve users’ everyday viewing us to overcome two daunting challenges. First, shutting o sub pixels may damage the display appearance, introducing incomplete Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or content such as discontinuous lines or objects. The color perception classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed of the content may also change since the human eye will smooth for prot or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the rst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM out the color of neighboring on/o pixels. Second, due to the va must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, rying content features, dierent regions of the display shall exhibit to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specic permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. dierent visual redundancy and therefore require a regionspecic MM’17, Mountain View, CA design. This is further complicated by that OLED power is also © 2017 ACM. 9781450349062/17/10...$15.00 contentdependent, making it hard to strike a perfect balance. DOI: 10.1145/3123266.3123344 MM’17, Oct., Mountain View, CA Zhisheng Yan and Chang Wen Chen To tackle these challenges, we propose ShutPix , a display power widely expressed as [1, 7, 11, 18] saving system for OLED smartphones that can optimally shut o N N N (set value to zero) redundant subpixels before the content is dis = + + Pdisp fr (ri ) f!(i ) fb (bi ) (2) played. Based on visual acuity and a set of motivational studies, i=1 i=1 i=1 ShutPix derives the minimum perceivable region and candidate where N is the number of pixels and r , , b are the RGB values of patterns for subpixel shuto. Furthermore, we explore the lumi i i i pixel i. The power models for displaying RGB subpixels ( f , f , f ) nance masking and contrast masking eects, and propose a visual r ! b has a powerlaw increasing trend with the RGB values. Furthermore, redundancy based weighting scheme to dierentiate display regi when r = = b , the display power of blue subpixel is the highest ons. Finally, ShutPix enforces the subpixel shuto by optimizing i i i whereas red and green subpixels have similar power eciency. the shuto pattern for each region in order to minimize the overall display power without aecting viewing perception. 2.3 Related Work We have implemented ShutPix on Android devices. ShutPix can OLED power reduction. On commercial devices, brightness dim support legacy Apps for everyday viewing and can be disabled for ming [ 32 , 39 ] that uniformly darkens the OLED screen has been VR. We validate ShutPix by realworld experiments under various implemented as a default setting. Furthermore, researchers have practical settings including App type, display content, and OLED strived to improve OLED energy eciency by color transform. Cha device, as well as by comparing ShutPix with prior color transform meleon [ 10 ] transformed the color map of web browsers to deliver schemes. The results show that ShutPix can, on average, save 21% powerecient color based on userdened preference. Focus [ 35 ] of display power and 15% of system power without degrading user exploited users’ topdown reading manner on smartphones and viewing experience. proportionally dimmed the screen to save display power. Although In sum, the contributions of the proposed research include: these systems can result in large power reduction, they concentrate • A set of motivational studies that inspire the design requi on preserving the usability rather than the delity of display and rements of ShutPix. (Section 3). thus may not be suitable to Apps with rich media content. • A systematic design of ShutPix governed by the unique To improve content delity, Anand et al. mapped each pixel color features of OLED devices and human vision. (Section 4). under the constraints of hue, saturation and vale (HSV) [ 1]. Chen • A practical demo of subpixel shuto to reduce power wit et al. classied video content such that the HSV thresholds of color hout impacting users’ visual perception. (Section 56) transform were decided by the video category [ 8]. Lin et al. dimmed each displayed image regions individually subject to the structural 2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK similarity (SSIM) constraint [ 18 ]. Kang et al. converted the lumi 2.1 Human Visual Acuity nance histogram to simultaneously increase luminance contrast and reduce OLED power [ 15 ]. Crayon [ 34 ] transformed the color Visual acuity is a measure of the spatial resolution of the human and shape of objects on the display under color distance threshold. vision system that is dependent on both the object size and the These works focus on manipulating the color by only considering viewing distance. A normal vision is dened as the ability to discri the content delity. Instead, ShutPix additionally explores the de minate two objects by 2 arc minute, i.e., 1/30 degree [ 21 ]. As shown vice characteristics, i.e., the substantial gap between pixel density in Figure 1, the discriminating angle θ for objects can be dened as, and visual acuity, to obtain another powersaving space.