Parallel Digital Halftoning by Error-Diffusion

Digital halftoning, or dithering, is the technique commonly used to render a color or grayscale image on a printer, a computer monitor or other bi-level displays. A particular halftoning technique that has been used extensively in the past is the socalled error diffusion technique. For a number of years it was believed that this technique is inherently sequential and could not be parallelized. In this paper we present and analyze a simple, yet optimal, error-diffusion parallel algorithm for digital halftoning and we discuss an implementation on a parallel machine. In particular, we describe implementations on data-parallel computers that contain linear arrays and two-dimensional meshes of processing elements. Our algorithm runs in 2·n+m parallel steps, a considerable improvement over the 10·m·n sequential algorithm. We expect that this research will lead to the development of faster printers and larger high-resolution monitors. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.4.3 [Computing Me...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: BIRTHDAY
• Authors: Panagiotis Takis Metaxas
• Keywords: Applied Computing, BIRTHDAY 2003, Digital Halftoning, Error Diffusion Technique, Particular Halftoning Technique