Design of Frame-Rate Doubling Technology for Large-Screen LCD-TV and Subjective Verification of Its Motion Quality Improvement

This paper discusses a frame rate conversion (FRC) technology that improves LCD picture quality (PQ) by doubling the frame rate to 120 Hz; an observer study on the resulting quality is also reported. To achieve a high-performance LCD-TV system, we first re-consider fundamental design issues, such as characteristics of the human visual system, motion content in real broadcast video, and current viewing conditions related to screen size. We then discuss how FRC is effective in improving the PQ of large-screen LCD-TVs; we show that onscreen captions can be particularly improved. Next, we discuss an FRC technology using a novel approach that improves the PQ of onscreen captions; it also reduces motion vector estimation problems. A subjective study using paired comparisons of two LC-TVs with this FRC technology showed that at motion speeds below 21 deg/sec (80% of the onscreen captions), the PQ could be increased to above that of an acceptance limit of 3.5.