• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.183-193
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• 1998

Color inverse halftoning is the transformation of a color-halftone image to a continuous-tone color image that is more natural in human vision. In this paper, we propose a new smoothing mask that can remove halftone patterns in channel effectively and we apply it to color inverse halftoning. The proposed smoothing mask can make channel images more smooth and natural in human vision than traditional ones. Its characteristic can be adapted automatically according to the various color halftone images. We analyze the result images in various aspects through experiments. Experimental results show that the mask is useful for color inverse halftoning. It can be applied to field of multimedia application, such as desktop publishing, color facsimile and digital library construction.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.164-172
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• 2004

Halftoning of gray-scale image is a process to produce a binary image. The error diffusion halftoning method produces high qualify binary image but that has some defects such as sharpening and directional artifacts. We propose the threshold modulation to reduce such defects. The proposed algorithm uses thresholds reflecting local characteristic of image. We calculate thresholds which minimize errors of flat region of each gray-scale level by using a linear gain between original image and error-diffused image and then represent edge by compensating thresholds in proportion to edge information. The proposed method improves on halftone quality by minimizing an error which cause sharpening and directional artifact.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.27-34
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• 2009

Block truncation coding (BTC) is a simple and efficient image compression technique. However, it yields images of unacceptable quality and significant blocking effects are seen when the block size is increasing. Ordered dither block truncation coding (ODBTC) was proposed to solve above problem maintaining the same compression capability. In this paper, we propose a data hiding method which can be applied to halftone images. EMD was developed by Zhang and Wang [6] for data hiding in the grayscale image. Therefore, EMD is not proper for bitmap images. In this paper, we show that EMD can be used to apply bitmap halftone image. In our experiments, we prove that our method is efficient in a halftone image.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.87-92
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• 2004

Digital halftoning is to quantize a grayscale image to binary image. The error diffusion halftoning generates high quality bilevel image. But that also has some defects such as warms effect, sharpening and etc. To reduce these defects, Kite proposed the modified threshold modulation that has a parameter to control sharpening. Nevertheless some degradation left near edges with large luminance change. In this paver, we propose a method to control the parameter in proportional to local edge magnitude. The results of computer simulation show more reductions of the sharpening in the halftone image. Especially there are great improvement of quality near edges with large luminance change.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.313-321
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• 2005

Digital halftoning is a process to produce a binary image so that the original image and its binary counterpart appear similar when observed from a distance. Among digital halftoning methods, error diffusion is a procedure for generating high quality bilevel images from continuous-tone images but blurs the edge information in the bilevel images. To solve this problem, we propose the improved error diffusion using local spatial information of the original images. Based on the fact that the human vision perceives not a pixel but local mean of input image, we compute edge enhancement information(EEI) by appling the ratio of a pixel and its adjacent pixels to local mean. The weights applied to local means is computed using the ratio of local activity measure(LAM) to the difference between input pixels of 3$\times$3 blocks and theirs mean. LAM is the measure of luminance changes in local regions and is obtained by adding the square of the difference between input pixels of 3$\times$3 blocks and theirs mean. We add the value to a input pixel of quantizer to enhance edge. The performance of the proposed method is compared with conventional methods by measuring the edge correlation. The halftone images by using the proposed method show better quality due to the enhanced edge. And the detailed edge is preserved in the halftone images by using the proposed method. Also the proposed method improves the quality of halftone images because unpleasant patterns for human visual system are reduced.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.221-228
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• 2005

The paper proposes the improved error diffusion halftoning system to enhance the edges using the spatial perceptual characteristics of the human visual system. The proposed method computes a spatial variation(SV), which is the difference between a pixel luminance and the average of its $3{\times}3$ neighborhood pixels' luminances weighted according to the spatial positioning. Information of edge enhancement(IEE) Is computed using the SV and the local average luminance. The IEE is added to the quantizer's input pixel and feeds into the halftoning quantizer. The quantizer produces the halftone image having the enhanced edge. The performance of the proposed method is compared with conventional methods by measuring the edge correlation. The halftone images by using the proposed method show better quality due to the enhanced edge. And the detailed edge is preserved in the halftone images by using the proposed method.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.26 no.7
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• pp.42-49
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• 1989

A new integrated coding method is proposed in this study for embedding the text information including Hangul into an image. A monochrome analog image may be quantized to a few leveled digital image and be displayed on bi-leveled output devices by using halftone processing techniques. Text data are embedded on each micro pattern. Based on this concept, the encoding and the decoding algorithm are implemented and experiments are performed. As a result, the average amount of the embedded text information is more than 8 bpp (bits per pixer) in this halftone processed image converted form a $64{\times}64$ image, i.e, corresponding to 2000 characters in Hangul, or 4000 characters in alphanumeral. using this algorithm, the integrated personal record management system is implemented.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.1C
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• pp.72-80
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• 2009

Look-up table based inverse halftoning from the digital color halftone image is proposed in this paper, which uses vector adaptive filter for the nonexisting patterns in the table. Halftone image is obtained from a continuous -tone image, which can be restored into continuous one from the digital binary image by way of inverse halftoning method. Look-up table based method usually processes fast and has even performances over the various halftoning. The numbers of pixels in the pattern of table and the method how to define the table elements for each R, G, B channels can effect largely for its performance. The proposed method uses 16 pixels in the table considering the diversity of the expressions from their patterns and with memory size as well. This also proposed how to combine R, G, B channels into one. Experimental results showed the better performance in the expression of colors, better color restoration and the short processing time compared with the conventional ones.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
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• v.36S no.10
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• pp.72-82
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• 1999

The error diffusion algorithm is excellent for reproducing continuous gray-scale images to bianry images and also has good edge characteristics. However, it is well known that artifacts with objectionable patterns can occur in the halftoned images. On the other hand, a halftone algorithm using blue noise mask has been proposed. where the halftoning is achieved by a pixelwise comparison of gray-scale image with an array, the blue noise mask. It doesn't have pattern artifacts, but the halftoned image looks unclear because the quantization errors are not feedbacked compared to the error diffusion. In this paper, edge enhanced error diffusion which dithers the threshold with the blue noise mask is proposed. We show that the proposed algorithm can produce unstructured and edge enhanced halftone images. This algorithm is analyzed by the concept of an equivalent input image. The performace of the proposed algorithm is compared with that of the conventional halftoning by measuring the radially averaged power spectrum and edge correlation.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.162-168
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• 2008

A look-up table based vector adaptive filter is proposed in color inverse halftoning. Inverse halftoning converts halftone image into a continuous-tone image. The templates and training images are required in the process of look-up table based methods, which can be obtained from distributed patterns in the sample halftone images and their original images. Although the look-up table based methods usually are faster and show better performances in PSNR than other methods do, they show wide range of qualities depending on how they treat nonexisting patterns in the look-up table. In this paper, a vector adaptive filter is proposed to compensate for these nonexisting patterns, which achieves better quality owing to the contributed informations about hue, saturation, and intensity of surrounding pixels. The experimental results showed that the proposed method resulted in higher PSNR than that of conventional Best Linear Estimation method. The bigger the size of the template in the look-up table becomes, the more outstanding quality in the proposed method can be obtained.