Presented at the 1998 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing

Fast Blind Inverse Halftoning

Niranjan Damera-Venkata, Thomas D. Kite, Mahalakshmi Venkataraman, and Brian L. Evans

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering Science Building, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-1084 USA

tomk@audioprecision.com - bevans@ece.utexas.edu

Paper - Software

Halftoning Research at UT Austin

Abstract

We present a fast, non-iterative technique for producing grayscale images from error diffused and dithered halftones. The first stage of the algorithm consists of a Gaussian filter and a median filter, while the second stage consists of a bandpass filter, a thresholding operation, and a median filter. The second stage enhances the rendering of edges in the inverse halftone. We compare our algorithm to the best reported kernel estimation, wavelet, and Bayesian algorithms to show that it delivers comparable PSNR and subjective quality at a fraction of the computation and memory requirements. For error diffused halftones, our technique is seven times faster than the MAP estimation method and 70 times faster than the wavelet method. For dithered halftones, our technique is 200 times faster than the MAP estimation method. A C implementation of the algorithm is available at http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~bevans/projects/inverseHalftoning.html.

Last Updated 11/08/04.