Low-cost Subpixel Rendering for Diverse Displays

Subpixel rendering increases the apparent display resolution by taking into account the subpixel structure of a given display. In essence, each subpixel is addressed individually, allowing the underlying signal to be sampled more densely. Unfortunately, naïve subpixel sampling introduces color aliasing, as each subpixel only displays a specific color (usually R, G, and B subpixels are used). As previous work has shown, chromatic aliasing can be reduced significantly by taking the sensitivity of the human visual system into account. In this work, we find optimal filters for subpixel rendering for a diverse set of 1D and 2D subpixel layout patterns. We demonstrate that these optimal filters can be approximated well with analytical functions. We incorporate our filters into GPU-based multisample antialiasing to yield subpixel rendering at a very low cost (1-2ms filtering time at HD resolution). We also show that texture filtering can be adapted to perform efficient subpixel rendering. Finally, we analyze the findings of a user study we performed, which underpins the increased visual fidelity that can be achieved for diverse display layouts, by using our optimal filters.