Research and development toward automatic luminance control of electronic displays

Electronic displays in military cockpits require adjustments of luminance a s the ambient environment changes from daylight to night. An automatic lumi nance control for electronic cockpit displays could remove the unnecessary burden of manual display adjustment. This article discusses a research proj ect that investigates the effects of forward field of view (FFOV) luminance and ambient illumination on luminance settings of a liquid crystal display . Forward-looking infrared radar sensor images and a grayscale pattern were presented to pilots. Pilots adapted to the FFOV luminance and were require d to adjust the display luminance under various levels of ambient illuminat ion until they could just see the target in the sensor image, or until they could see all 16 levels of the grayscale pattern. A regression analysis wa s performed and multiple linear regression models were created for both sen sor and grayscale data. The models fit the data well, and the equation for sensor data can be used for the development of an algorithm to automaticall y control luminance. The results are compared with a Boeing automatic brigh tness control.