Joint quantization and dithering of color images

Quantization and dithering operations are generally performed sequentially: first quantization and then, dithering. The latter is aware of the former. Dithering manipulates the quantization error to hide it. The same can not be said about the quantizer. The quantizer often works to minimize the quantization error without regard to the fact that the results will be changed by the ditherer. We aim to increase the overall image quality by designing the quantizer in such a way that better results will be obtained after dithering.