Spatially uniform colors for projectors and tiled displays

Alain Pagani Didier Stricker Abstract — A major issue when setting up multi-projector tiled displays is the spatial non-uniformity of the color throughout the display’s area. Indeed, the chromatic properties do not only vary between two different projectors, but also between different spatial locations inside the displaying area of one single projector. A new method for calibrating the colors of a tiled display is presented. An iterative algorithm to construct a correction table which makes the luminance uniform over the projected area of one single projector is presented first. This so-called intra-projector calibration uses a standard camera as a luminance measuring device and can be processed in parallel for all projectors. Once the color inside each projector is spatially uniform, the set of displayable colors – the color gamut – of each projector is measured. On the basis of these measurements, the goal of the inter-projector calibration is to find an optimal gamut shared by all the projectors. Finding the optimal color gamut displayable by n projectors in time O(n) is shown, and the color conversion from one specific color gamut to the common global gamut is derived. The method of testing it on a tiled display consisting of 48 projectors with large chrominance shifts was experimentally validated.