The electrophoretic display (EPD) with low power consumption, good sunlight readability, and flexibility is ideal for the Internet of Things. However, color EPDs have very limited grayscales (typically 1-bit) because it is challenging to precisely control the electrophoretic particles of multiple colors. Thus, halftone is usually employed to achieve continuous-tonal full-color EPDs alternatively. Nevertheless, halftone achieves continuous tones at the expense of a significant increase in driving current. This study first proposes and experimentally verifies a model that can accurately predict a driving current from image content. Next, a multi-objective optimized (MOO) halftone algorithm based on MOEA/D (multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition) is proposed to consider image quality and driving current simultaneously. As a result, Pareto optimality is achieved, i.e., no image simultaneously performs better in image quality and driving current. A mean driving current reduction of 33.8% concerning the traditional error-diffusion algorithm is experimentally verified on a seven-color EPD with maintained halftone image quality. Considering the high computational complexity of the iteration-based MOO algorithm, this study also discusses the real-time generation of optimal halftone images using a generative adversarial network (GAN). Compared with the optimal halftone images slowly generated by the MOO, the GAN achieves almost the same driving current and a mean absolute error of 2.04, in terms of CIE76 color difference. The proposed algorithm enables full-color EPDs with high-quality continuous tones, reduced power consumption, and a GAN-based real-time implementation.
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