Grayscale digital halftoning using binary PSO

Grayscale digital halftoning is an important research area for electronic display system. This technique represents the multi-level continuous tone images with fewer available levels. Considering 0 and 1 as black and white, respectively, this can be shaped as binary image generation for grayscale reproduction. This paper presents application of binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) towards generating eye-pleasant binary patterns. The BPSO is employed to minimize the visual cost function that addresses local tonal and structural characteristics of original multi-level image. Apart from tonal and structural match, the homogeneity in binary pixel distribution is also addressed through cost function. The results are shown pictorially and evaluated objectively against popular image quality evaluation metrics. The evaluation results show the potential of BPSO to generate high-quality halftone images.