Patent ID: 8184089

Claim:
A method of selecting an illumination level for a backlight in a display system, the method comprising: determining a first value, wherein the first value is the highest illumination level requested by a pixel in a frame; determining a second value for the frame, wherein the second value is calculated by: dividing possible illumination levels into a predetermined number of bins, each of the bins covering a range of illumination levels; determining an error function for at least the bin covering the highest range of illumination levels, wherein the error function correlates with luminance error introduced by selecting an illumination level of a neighboring bin covering a lower range of illumination levels; identifying a critical bin of the bins, wherein the critical bin has an error function exceeding a threshold number and has the highest range of illumination levels out of the bins having error functions exceeding the threshold number; and calculating the second value based on the illumination level of the critical bin; selecting a lower value between the first and second values.