Invited Paper for the 1999 IEEE Int. Conf. on Image Processing

Lossy Compression of Stochastic Halftones with JBIG2

Magesh Valliappan (1), Brian L. Evans (1), David A. D. Tompkins (2), and Faouzi Kossentini (2)

(1) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering Science Building, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-1084
magesh@ece.utexas.edu - bevans@ece.utexas.edu

(2) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4 Canada
davet@ee.ubc.edu - faouzi@ee.ubc.edu

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JBIG2 codec - Literature search

Halftoning Research at UT Austin

The JBIG2 standard supports lossless and lossy coding models for text, halftone, and generic regions in bi-level images. For the JBIG2 lossy halftone compression mode, halftones are descreened before encoding. Previous JBIG2 descreening implementations produce high-quality images for clustered dot halftones at high compression rates but significantly degrades the image quality for stochastic halftones, even at much lower rates. In this paper, we develop

  1. a flexible, computationally efficient, JBIG2-compliant method for descreening stochastic halftones that reduces noise, artifacts, and blurring
  2. quality measures for linear and nonlinear distortion in compressed halftones, and
  3. rate-distortion tradeoffs for the encoder parameters.

Last Updated 10/01/02.