Colorant-based direct binary search halftoning

Abstract. In this paper, we propose color design criteria for uniformcolor textures, and present a new colorant-based color halftoningtechnique which meets these criteria, and hence generates highquality color halftones. The basic idea behind our halftoning methodis to control the quality of each colorant texture separately alongwith the total dot distribution. In order to achieve this, we first set thetotal dot arrangement and then color the dots optimally without al-tering the total dot arrangement. This corresponds to a constrainedoptimization problem, and we solve this via the swap-only directbinary search heuristic. We employ a luminance human visual sys-tem model to enforce exclusion of visually nonhomogeneous pat-terns for the total dot distribution, as well as for each individual colo-rant texture. Examples of color halftone images generated using ourtechnique are compared to images produced by a plane-independent color halftoning algorithm and by the HP 970 Cx inkjetprinter driver.

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