Distributed processing for video enhancement and display power management

In visual display devices such as LCD devices with backlight illumination, the backlight typically consumes most of device battery power. In the interest of displaying a given pixel pattern at a minimized backlight level, the pattern can be transformed while maintaining image quality, with a transform determined from pixel luminance statistics. Aside from, or in addition to being used for such minimizing, a transform also can be used for image enhancement, for a displayed image better to meet a visual perception quality. In either case, the transform preferably is constrained for enforcing one or several display attributes. In a network setting, the technique can be implemented in distributed fashion, so that subtasks of the technique are performed by different, interconnected processors such as server, client and proxy processors.