IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 10, no. 10, pp. 1552-1565, Oct. 2001.

Design and Analysis of Vector Color Error Diffusion Halftoning Systems

Niranjan Damera-Venkata (1) and Brian L. Evans (2)

(1) Halftoning and Image Processing Group, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304
damera@hpl.hp.com

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

Draft of Paper for Press - Vector Filter Design Matlab Code

Halftoning Toolbox for Matlab - Halftoning Research at UT Austin

Abstract

Traditional error diffusion halftoning is a high quality method for producing binary images from digital grayscale images. Error diffusion shapes the quantization noise power into the high frequency regions where the human eye is the least sensitive. Error diffusion may be extended to color images by using error filters with matrix-valued coefficients to take into account the correlation among color planes. For vector color error diffusion, we propose three contributions. First, we analyze vector color error diffusion based on a new matrix gain model for the quantizer, which linearizes vector error diffusion. The model predicts key characteristics of color error diffusion, esp. image sharpening and noise shaping. The proposed model includes linear gain models for the quantizer by Ardalan and Paulos and by Kite, Evans, and Bovik as special cases. Second, based on our model, we optimize the noise shaping behavior of color error diffusion by designing error filters that are optimum with respect to any given linear spatially-invariant model of the human visual system. Our approach allows the error filter to have matrix-valued coefficients and diffuse quantization error across color channels in an opponent color representation. Thus, the noise is shaped into frequency regions of reduced human color sensitivity. To obtain the optimal filter, we derive a matrix version of the Yule-Walker equations which we solve by using a gradient descent algorithm. Finally, we show that the vector error filter has a parallel implementation as a polyphase filterbank.


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Last Updated 01/30/03.