Stroboscopic effect of LED lighting

The stroboscopic effect is one of the most visible artifact of temporally modulated light, which exists even at relatively high frequencies. It especially becomes apparent with LED lighting, because of its fast temporal response to changes in the driving signal. This paper describes a method to measure the visibility of the stroboscopic effect, and discusses the impact of frequency, duty cycle, wave shape and intensity. All experimental results are combined to define a measure that accurately predicts the visibility of the stroboscopic effect based on the weighted summation of the energy in different frequency components of the driving signal. This measure can be used by industry to improve the perceived quality of LED lighting systems.