<title>Color diffusion: error diffusion for color halftones</title>

Abstract

Error Diffusion is a high-performance halftoning method in which quantization errors are diffused to 'future' pixels. Originally intended for grayscale images, it is traditionally extended to color images by Error-Diffusing each of the three color planes independently. In this paper we show that augmenting the Error Diffusion paradigm with a simple design rule based on certain characteristics of human color perception, results in a novel color halftoning algorithm named color diffusion. The output of color diffusion is of considerable higher quality compared to separable error diffusion. The algorithm presented requires no additional memory and entails a reasonable increase in run-time.