Characterization of Error Diffusion Halftone Images based on Subband Decompostion

Digital halftoning creates the illusion of continuous tone output for a binary device. Halftoning using error diffusion reduces local quantization error by filtering the quantization error in a feedback loop. In this paper, we present a new scheme to evaluate error diffusion halftoning. An integer-coefficient filter bank is applied to an error diffusion halftone image to obtain frequency subbands. Based on these subband images, statistical distribution measurements and the correlations between the original image and the residual image are defined to evaluate the qualities of several error diffusion algorithms. Experimental results show that the rank of several error diffusion algorithms based on our gauges is consistent with the results of previous research works