Blue noise digital color halftoning with multiscale error diffusion

Abstract

A recent trend in color halftoning is to explicitly control color overlapping, dot positioning, and dot coloring in different stages of the halftoning process. As feature-preserving multiscale error diffusion (FMED) shows its capability and flexibility in dot positioning in both binary and multilevel halftoning applications, it naturally becomes a potential candidate in the development of new color halftoning algorithms. This paper presents an FMED-based color halftoning algorithm developed based on the aforementioned strategy. In contrast to the algorithms that adopt the same strategy, the proposed algorithm has no bias for specific Neugebauer primaries in dot coloring and has no fixed scanning path to place dots in dot positioning. These features allow the algorithm to place dots of the correct colors on the right positions with less constraint. Hence, the algorithm is better able to preserve image features.