Patent ID: 7176941

Claim:
In a processing device associated with a display device that has a plurality of pixels, each pixel having a plurality of separately controllable colored pixel sub-components, and wherein the colored sub-pixel components form colored stripes in either a horizontal or a vertical direction, a method of dropout control adapted to compensate for thin image features when rendering the image, comprising the acts of: receiving a bitmap having a plurality of samples representing an image, each sample corresponding to one of the separately controllable sub-pixel components; for a direction that is perpendicular to the stripping formed by the sub-pixel components, identifying a set of one or more horizontally adjacent sub-pixel component samples that fall within an outline of the bitmap image; determining whether the set of one or more horizontally adjacent sub-pixel component samples comprises a minimum number of horizontally adjacent sub-pixel component samples; and when it is determined that the set of one or more horizontally adjacent sub-pixel component samples fails to comprise the minimum number of horizontally adjacent sub-pixel component samples selectively adding additional sub-pixel components to the set of samples such that the set of samples comprises the minimum number of horizontally adjacent sub-pixel component samples.