• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.362-371
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• 2009

The key technology for developing high quality LCDs is about manufacturing BLUs with homogeneous dot distributions. Commonly, homogeneous dot distributions are obtained by the halftoning methods which convert a gray-scale image to a binary image. Among many halftoning algorithms, the error-diffusion technique based on the principle distance is known to show homogeneous dot distributions. However, this technique has a drawback; the extent of the principle distance at each pixel with respect to those of the neighboring pixels can be too small or big creating a gap or overlap. In this paper, we propose a new error diffusion algorithm based on the variable principle distance which improves the existing error diffusion technique based on the principle distance. The variable principle distance at a given pixel is calculated with gray-scale values of the pixel and its neighbors and thus the principle distance value is variable depending on the direction from that pixel. This variable principle distance technique helps BLUs obtain homogeneous dot distributions.