A spatial domain optimization method to generate plane dependent masks

摘要

Stochastic screening technique uses a fixed threshold array to generate halftoned images. When this technique is applied to color images, an important problem is how to generate the masks for different color planes. Ideally, a set of plane dependent color masks should have the following characteristics: a) when total ink coverage is less than 100%, no dots in different colors should overlap from each other. b) for each individual mask, dot distribution should be uniform, c) no visual artifact should be visible due to the low frequency patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel color mask generation method in which the optimal dot placement is searched directly in spatial domain. The advantage of using the spatial domain approach is that we can control directly the dot uniformity during the optimization, and we can also cope with the color plane-dependency by introducing some inter-plane constraints. We will show that using this method, we can generate plane dependent color masks with the characteristics mentioned above