70.2: Virtual Display: A Platform for Evaluating Display Color Calibration Kits

We propose a method of evaluating the performance of color calibration kits for LCD monitors. Routine color calibration is imperative for critical applications that rely on color fidelity such as digital pathology and professional graphics. However, the commercially available products vary greatly in price and performance with no available evaluation standard. We propose the concept of Virtual Display, a universal display platform that emulates tone reproduction curves. A field programmable gate array board was used to process the video signals based on a preprogrammed look-up table, which contains the tone reproduction curves of the target display. A spectroradiometer-based and a colorimeter-based color calibration kits were challenged by 8 virtual displays that have problematic tone reproduction curves. The results show that both color calibration kits offer only one-dimensional lookup tables for each channel, which might be insufficient. We also spectrally characterized three real displays of different grades and derived spectral models for them. By using the virtual display and spectral models, evaluation of color calibration kits can be greatly simplified and standardized without the burden of optical measurement on target displays.