HP Labs Technical Reports

Color Diffusion: Error-Diffusion for Color Halftones

Shaked, Doron; Arad, Nur; Fitzhugh, Andrew; Sobel, Irwin

HPL-96-128R1

Keyword(s): color halftoning; error diffusion; minimal brightness variation criterion

Abstract: Error Diffusion is a high-performance halftoning method in which quanitization errors are diffused to "future" pixels. Originally intended for grayscale images, it is traditionally extended to color images by Error Diffusing each of the three color planes independently (separable Error Diffusion). In this report we show that adding to the Error Diffusion paradigm a simple design rule which is based on certain characteristics of human color perception results in a novel color halftoning algorithm, whose output is of considerable higher quality compared to separable Error Diffusion. The algorithm presented requires no additional memory and entails a reasonable increase in run-time.

10 Pages

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