A method of stress compensation in a display device includes accumulating a brightness value of images displayed by the display device, encoding the accumulated brightness value to preserve a protected portion of the accumulated brightness value, compressing the accumulated brightness value, storing the compressed accumulated brightness value in a memory, retrieving and decompressing the compressed accumulated brightness value to generate a decompressed value, and decoding the decompressed value based on the protected portion to generate a decoded value corresponding to the accumulated brightness value, the decoded value having lower compression noise than the decompressed value.