Patent Abstract:
A method and apparatus for remapping video images from a display processor, represented by a quad-subpixel digital data stream to a striped-subpixel color display using a processor including an intermediate pixel memory where the processor presents an intermediate digital data stream to a resizing engine.

Full Description:
FIELD OF INVENTION 
     The present invention relates to the field of color displays, and more specifically, to a method and apparatus for manipulating subpixels contained within a serial data stream to form a displayed image. 
     BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 
     In an aircraft, pilots obtain critical information from instruments that include color displays. Certain color displays use a quad subpixel arrangement while other displays use a striped subpixel arrangement. 
     A quad-subpixel display  100  is depicted in FIG.  1  and includes pixels  110 , where each pixel is comprised on a red subpixel  111 , a first green subpixel  112 , a blue subpixel  113 , and a second green subpixel  114 . This type of display has been developed specifically for military applications where it is desirable to double the display resolution for monochrome operation such as during the display of night vision imagery. 
     FIG. 2 shows a striped-subpixel display  200  that includes pixels  210 , where each pixel is comprised on a red subpixel  211 , a green subpixel  212 , and a blue subpixel  213 . The striped-subpixel display is very similar to the Sony Trinitron® color television and has been developed extensively for commercial uses. 
     In the years following the Cold War, and especially during the present, commercial display technology has surpassed military display technology. For example, the typical laptop computer available commercially has a greater resolution along with an attendant higher number of pixels than many of the most advanced military displays in service. 
     A significant amount of aircraft specific graphics symbology, and more particularly military specific graphics symbology, has been developed and continues to be used on aircraft displays. One specific military unique display includes a quad-subpixel arrangement. It is desirable to replace this quad-subpixel display on certain aircraft with the newer striped-subpixel display. However, changing the software underlying to this graphic symbology usually entails a long and costly development process. 
     There is a need in the art for a hardware apparatus and method that can intercept a digital data stream intended for a quad-subpixel display and reformat it into a digital data stream suitable for a striped-subpixel color display without introducing a significant time delay into the resultant displayed image. Such an apparatus and method will allow the re-use of previously developed military symbology without software modification in an existing aircraft display processor. 
     SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION 
     I have discovered that it is possible to process a digital data stream intended for a quad-subpixel display, for example a serial digital stream, by padding extra data values to the serial digital stream in real time. The resulting intermediate digital stream containing pad data, if displayed, would show a distorted picture. However, I have further discovered that the distortion can be removed by use of a commercially available resizing engine. 
     My invention extracts color and intensity information, for each subpixel in a digital data stream, representing a quad-subpixel color image and processes and redirects this information into an intermediate pixel memory. Additional data values are interspersed between the input values to pad the intermediate pixel memory; for example, the odd input lines do not include an ‘blue’ sub pixel data. After processing, the intermediate pixel memory contains data that can be used as an input to a display resizing engine such as a Genesis® chip, which in turn provides a digital data stream output that is suitable to drive a striped subpixel display. Advantageously, my invention can resize an alternate bit map from the intermediate pixel memory in order to account for the potentially different quantity of pixels in the quad subpixel (m times n) versus the striped subpixel (x times y) display. 
     In one specific illustrative embodiment of my invention, the extra data values padded into the data stream have a zero value. In a second illustrative embodiment, the padded zero values are replaced with average intensity values. 
    
    
     BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS 
     FIG. 1 depicts a quad-subpixel display in accordance with the prior art. 
     FIG. 2 depicts a striped-subpixel color display in accordance with the prior art. 
     FIG. 3 depicts an existing aircraft display processor designed to drive a quad-subpixel color display in accordance with the prior art. 
     FIG. 4 is a schematic diagram of one illustrative embodiment of my invention utilizing the existing aircraft display as typified by FIG. 3 to drive a striped-subpixel color display. 
     FIG. 5 depicts the contents of an intermediate pixel memory according to a first illustrative embodiment of my invention. 
     FIG. 6 depicts the contents of an intermediate pixel memory according to a second illustrative embodiment of my invention. 
    
    
     DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION 
     Referring to FIG. 3, a block diagram of a typical display processor  300  that is used to drive a quad-subpixel color display  100  on board a vehicle such as an aircraft is shown. A symbol generator  301  creates graphical symbols in response to a series of commands. A video digitizer  302  processes an incoming video stream (not shown) into digital data, such as 32-bits per pixel with 8-bits per subpixel for a quad-subpixel display. Both the symbol generator  301  and the video digitizer  302  load digital data into an image memory, such as an image memory comprising a red memory plane  311 , a green memory plane  312 , and a blue memory plane  313 . A quad-subpixel driver  320  fetches data from the image memory to produce a quad-subpixel digital data stream  321 . A characteristic of the quad-subpixel digital data stream  321  is that it comprises odd and even line repeating data sequences. The odd lines may contain data for the red (R) subpixel  111  and the first green (G) subpixel  112  and the even lines may contain data for the second green (g) subpixel  114  and the blue (B) subpixel  113 , as illustrated in FIG.  1 . 
     Referring next to FIG. 4, in accordance with my invention, the output quad-subpixel digital data stream  321  from the aircraft display processor  300  is applied as an input to a processor  400  containing an intermediate pixel memory  450 . 
     Within processor  400 , a set of subpixel intensity information is extracted for each video line contained within the quad-subpixel digital data stream  321 , representing an input video image and stored in memory  450 . In one embodiment of my invention, as depicted in FIG. 5, each video line is comprised of an odd line and an even line, as follows. 
     1) The red subpixel at line x-coordinate=1 (R 1 ) intensity data contained on an odd line within the quad-subpixel digital data stream  321  is mapped into a first odd line memory position  411  contained within the intermediate pixel memory  450 . 
     2) The first green subpixel at line x-coordinate=1 (G 1 ) intensity data contained on an odd line within the quad-subpixel digital data stream  321  is mapped into a second odd line memory position  412  contained within the intermediate pixel memory  450 . 
     3) A digital value representing intensity=0 is loaded into a third odd line memory position  413  contained within the intermediate pixel memory  450 . 
     4) The above steps 1-3 are repeated for the remaining red (R) and first green (G) subpixels at line x-coordinates&gt;1 contained within the odd line within the quad-subpixel digital video stream  321  by loading the remaining subpixel data in the order: R, G, 0, into sequential memory positions contained within the intermediate pixel memory  450 . 
     5) A digital value representing intensity=0 is loaded into a first even line memory position  421  contained within the intermediate pixel memory  450 . 
     6) The second green subpixel at line x-coordinate=1 (g 1 ) intensity data contained on an even line within the quad-subpixel digital data stream  321  is mapped into a second even line memory position  422  contained within the intermediate pixel memory  450 . 
     7) The blue subpixel at line x-coordinate=1 (B 1 ) intensity data contained on a even line within the quad-subpixel digital video stream  321  is mapped into a third even line memory position  423  contained within an intermediate pixel memory  450 . 
     8) The above steps  5 - 7  are repeated for the remaining second green (g) and blue (B) subpixels at line x-coordinates&gt;1 contained within the even line within the quad-subpixel digital data stream  321  by loading said remaining subpixel data in the order:  0 , g, B, into sequential memory positions contained within the intermediate pixel memory  450 . 
     The processor  400  produces an output intermediate digital data stream  430  using the subpixel intensity data contained within the intermediate pixel memory  450 . A characteristic of the intermediate digital data stream  430  is that each odd line contains zero-intensity padding bits which could, for example, result in a subpixel bit sequence: R 1 , G 1 ,  0 , R 2 , G 2 ,  0 , . . . R 512 , G 512 ,  0 , for a 512×512 quad-subpixel display. A further characteristic of the intermediate digital data stream  430  is that each even line contains zero-intensity padding bits which could, for example, result in a subpixel bit sequence:  0 , g 1 , B 1 ,  0 , g 2 , B 2 , . . .  0 , g 512 , B 512 , for a 512×512 quad-subpixel display. A further characteristic of the intermediate digital data stream  430  is that the overall video image represented by the data stream is distorted in the horizontal direction, for example by being 133% wider than an undistorted input. 
     The intermediate digital data stream  430  is input into a display resizing engine  500 , such as a Genesis® chip. The resizing engine can adjust the aspect ratio of the video image represented by the intermediate digital data stream  430  by scaling the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the video image independently of each other using techniques that are known in the art. In one embodiment of my invention, the distorted video image represented by the intermediate digital data stream  430  is undistorted by scaling the horizontal dimension only, for example by scaling to 66.6%. The undistorted video image is sent from the resizing engine  500  to a striped-subpixel color display  200 . 
     In accordance with an aspect of my invention, the striped-subpixel color display  200  advantageously has a higher resolution than an original video image represented by the quad-subpixel digital data  321 . The resizing engine  500  scales the vertical dimension according to a vertical resolution ratio between the striped-subpixel color display  200  and the original video image, for example          (     768   512     )     .                          
     The resizing engine  500  scales the horizontal dimension according to both a horizontal resolution ratio, between the striped-subpixel color display  200  and the original video image, and a distortion factor introduced by an aspect of my invention discussed previously, for example          (       768   *   1.33     512     )     .                          
     Referring next to FIG. 6, a further embodiment of my invention is illustrated wherein the extra padding values are average intensity values. Advantageously, in this embodiment, the processor  400  first produces within the intermediate pixel memory  450  the distorted intermediate digital data stream containing the padded extra data zero values and the replaces these zero values with padded data values having average intensity values. Accordingly, as in the previous embodiment, a set of subpixel intensity information is extracted for each video line contained within the quad-subpixel digital data stream  321  (shown in FIG.  4 ). In this embodiment, the quad-subpixel digital data stream  321  for a current video line (N) is subdivided into a current video odd line repeating data sequence  610  and a current video even line repeating data sequence  620 . In a similar manner, the quad-subpixel digital data stream for a previous video line (N−1) is subdivided into a previous video odd line repeating data sequence and a previous video even line repeating data sequence  630 . In addition, the quad-subpixel digital data stream for a subsequent video line (N+1) is similarly subdivided into a subsequent video odd line repeating data sequence  640  and a subsequent video even line repeating data sequence. In this embodiment, the set of subpixel intensity information contained within the intermediate pixel memory  450  is further processed as follows, before the production of the intermediate digital data stream  430 . Starting at a second video line within the intermediate pixel memory  450  that represents the video input image and repeating for all subsequent lines, the steps listed below follow step No. 8 in the previous embodiment. 
     9) For line x-coordinate=1, an average blue video intensity between a current blue subpixel (B 1   N ), contained in the third even line memory position  423 , and a previous blue subpixel (B 1   (N−1) ), contained in a first previous even line memory position  633  and sourced from a previous video even line repeating data sequence  630 , is computed using the following equation:          average                 blue                 video                 intensity     =       (         B1   N     +     B1     (     N   -   1     )         2     )     .                            
     10) The average blue video intensity is loaded into the third odd line memory position  413  overwriting the digital value contained therein. 
     11) The above steps 9-10 are repeated to calculate a set of remaining blue (B) subpixels at line x-coordinates&gt;1 corresponding to the current video odd line repeating data sequence  610 . 
     12) An average red video intensity between a current red subpixel (R 1   N ), contained in the first odd line memory position  411 , and a subsequent red subpixel (R 1   (N−1) ), contained in a first subsequent odd line memory position  641  and sourced from a subsequent video odd line data stream  640 , is computed using the following equation:          average                 red                 video                 intensity     =       (         R1   N     +     R1     (     N   +   1     )         2     )     .                            
     13) The average red video intensity is loaded into the first even line memory position  421  overwriting the digital value contained therein. 
     14) The above steps 12-13 are repeated to calculate a set of remaining red (R) subpixels at line x-coordinates&gt;1 corresponding to the current video even line data stream  620 . 
     As in the previous embodiment, the processor  400  produces the intermediate digital data stream  430  using subpixel intensity data contained within the intermediate pixel memory  450 . Advantageously, in this alternate embodiment, only three video lines consisting of a previous video line, a current video line, and a subsequent video line, are required to be buffered within the intermediate pixel memory  450 . 
     Whereas the drawings and accompanying description have shown and described the preferred embodiment of the present invention, it should be apparent to those skilled in the art that various changes may be made in the form of the invention without affecting the scope thereof. Thus, in other embodiments of my invention, various other values may be utilized for the padded extra data values.

Technology Classification (CPC): 6