HP Labs Technical Reports

A Mixture Distortion Criterion for Halftones

Wong, Ping Wah

HPL-97-49

Keyword(s):distortion criterion; distortion measure; frequency weighted mean squared error; digital halftoning

Abstract: Frequency weighted mean squared error (FWMSE) is often used for measuring image quality, in generating halftones, and in considerations of lossy compression of halftones. We construct examples to show the weakness of FWMSE when applied to halftones. Specifically, we show that FWMSE does not directly reflect the uniformity in the spatial distribution of halftone dots. We then propose and examine a mixture distortion criterion that consists of FWMSE and a dot distance term to explicitly account for the spatial arrangement of dots.

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