Image processing for halftones

Compression is routinely used in printing pipelines. While both lossless and lossy compression methods exist for compressing halftones, dispersed types of halftones remain difficult to compress given their very nature. In recent years researchers have started looking at the problem of designing halftoners that generate both good quality and compressible halftones. We believe that the problem of optimizing halftoning for compression is a very interesting and useful area. Watermarking and steganography for halftone images arc relatively new areas that are motivated by the proliferation of networking and the exchange of digital data. We have described a number of approaches in watermarking halftones and embedding halftones into each other. Certainly many more aspects of this problem can and will be considered in the future.