IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 51-58, July 2003, invited paper.

Color Error Diffusion Halftoning

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

(1) HP Laboratories, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304-1126
damera@exch.hpl.hp.com

(2) Embedded Signal Processing Laboratory, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712 USA
Vishal.Monga@xeroxlabs.com - bevans@ece.utexas.edu

Draft of Paper - Color Figures

Halftoning Research at UT Austin

Abstract

Grayscale halftoning converts a continuous-tone image (e.g. 8 bits per pixel) to a lower resolution (e.g. 1 bit per pixel) for printing or display. Grayscale halftoning by error diffusion uses feedback to shape the quantization noise into high frequencies where the human visual system (HVS) is least sensitive. In color halftoning, the application of grayscale error diffusion methods to the individual colorant planes fails to exploit the HVS response to color noise. Ideally the quantization error must be diffused to frequencies and colors, to which the HVS is least sensitive. Further it is desirable for the color quantization to take place in a perceptual space so that the colorant vector selected as the output color is perceptually closest to the color vector being quantized. This article discusses the design principles of color error diffusion that differentiate it from grayscale error diffusion.

Color Figures

Color figures of the toucan image from the paper: In addition, the images are available as a single zip archive.

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Last Updated 01/16/06.