The USC Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering USC Signal and Image Processing Institute USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Southern California

Technical Report USC-SIPI-265

“A Multiscale Error-Diffusion Technique for Digital Halftoning”

by Ioannis Katsavounidis and C.-C. Jay Kuo

August 1994

A new digital halftoning technique based on multiscale error diffusion is examined in this research. We use an image quadtree to represent the input gray level image and the output halftoned image, and develop an iterative algorithm that searches the darker region of a given image via ``maximum intensity guidance" for assigning dots and diffuses the quantization error noncausally at each iteration. To measure the quality of halftoned images, we adopt a new criterion based on hierarchical intensity distribution. The proposed method provides very good results both visually and in terms of the hierarchical intensity quality measure.

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