A new class of B/W and color halftoning algorithms

A new class of dithering algorithms for black and white (B/W) and color images is presented. The basic idea behind the technique is to divide the image into small blocks and minimize the distortion between the original continuous tone image and its low-pass filtered halftone. This corresponds to a quadratic programming problem with linear constraints which is solved via the branch and bound algorithm. Examples of B/W and color dither images using the technique are shown and compared to halftones obtained via existing dithering algorithms.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>