• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.2 s.308
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• pp.40-47
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• 2006

This paper proposes a multitoning method using threshold modulation of MJBNM(Modified Jointly Blue Noise Mask) for banding artifacts reduction. As banding artifacts in multitoning appear as uniform dot distributions around the intermediate output levels, such multitone output results in discontinuity and visually unpleasing patterns in smooth transition regions. Therefore, to reduce these banding artifacts, the proposed method rearranges the dot distribution by introducing pixels in the neighborhood of output levels that occurs banding artifacts. First of all principal cause of banding artifacts are analyzed using mathematical description. Based on this analytical result, a threshold modulation technique of MJBNM which takes account of chrominance error and correlation between channels is applied. The original threshold range of MJBNM is first scaled linearly sot that the minimum and maximum of the scaled range include two pixel more than adjacent two output levels that cover an input value. In an input value is inside the vicinity of any intermediate output levels produce banding artifacts, the output is set to one of neighboring output levels based on the pointwise comparison result according to threshold modulation parameter that determines the dot density and distribution. In this case, adjacent pixels are introduced at the position where the scaled threshold values are located between two output levels and the minimum and maximum threshold values. Otherwise, a conventional multitoning method is applied. As a result, the proposed method effectively decreased the appearance of banding artifacts around the intermediate output levels. To evaluate the quality of the multitone result, HVS-WRMSE according to gray level for gray ramp image and S-CIELAB color difference for color ramp image are compared with other methods.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.227-236
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• 2003

This paper proposes a modified jointly-blue noise mask (MJBNM) method using the S-CIELAB color measure as digital color halftoning method. Based on an investigation of the relation between the pattern visibility and the chromatic error, of a blue noise pattern, a halftoning method is proposed that reduces the chromatic error, while preserving a high quality blue noise pattern. Accordingly, to reduce the chrominance error, the low-pass filtered error and S-CIELAB chrominance error are both considered during the mask generation procedure and calculated for single and combined patterns. Using the calculated low-pass filtered error, the patterns are then updated by either adding or removing dots from the multiple binary patterns. Finally, the pattern exhibiting the lower S-CIELAB chrominance error is selected. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm can produce a visually pleasing half toned image with a lower chrominance error than the JBNM method.