Halftoning Method by CMY Printing Using BNM

Digital halftoning is a technique to make an equivalent binary image from scanned photo or graphic images. Low pass filtering characteristic of human visual system can be applied to get the effect of spatial averaging of local area consisted of black and white pixels for gray image. The overlapping of black dot decreases brightness and black dot is very sensitive to human visual system in the bright region. In this paper, for gray-level expression, only bright gray region in the color image is considered for blue noise mask (BNM) approach. To solve this problem, BNM with CMY dot is used for the bright region instead of black dot. Dot-on-dot model with single mask causes the problem making much black dot overlap, color distortion. Therefore approach with three masks for C, M and Y each is proposed to decrease pixel overlap and color distortion.