Color control of a lighting system using RGBW LEDs

A lighting system is proposed to render objects under a variety of colored illumination. The proposed system is constructed with a LED unit, white diffusion filters, dimmers, and a personal computer as a controller. The LED unit is composed of four kinds of color LED lamps which are 12 red (R), 14 green (G), 12 blue (B) and 10 white (W) colors. The LED lamps have a linear input-output relationship and a larger color gamut than Adobe RGB. Since the lighting system has an independent white light source, white illumination can be produced using the white light source and a mixture of RGB primary sources. Therefore, to determine illumination color we have to solve a mapping problem from 3D color space to 4D space of RGBW digital values. This paper proposes an effective algorithm for determining the digital control signals of the RGBW lights, so that colored light is generated with arbitrary (x, y) chromaticity and luminance value Y. The performance of proposed method is examined in an experiment, where the accuracy of the colored light is evaluated with regard to the CIE color difference.