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The Hybrid ScreenImproving the Breed

Changhyung Lee and Jan P. Allebach, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractThe hybrid screen is a halftoning method that generates stochastic dispersed dot textures in highlights and periodic clustered dot textures in midtones. Each tone level is sequentially designed from highlight to midtone by applying an iterative halftoning algorithm such as direct binary search (DBS). By allowing random seeding followed by swap-only DBS in a predened core region within each microcell, each level can be designed while satisfying the stacking constraint and guaranteeing a smooth transition between levels. This paper describes a complete design process for the hybrid screen, introduces a number of enhancements to the original hybrid screen, and evaluates their impact on print quality. These enhancements include a multilevel screen design based on either extending a bilevel screen or directly generating a multilevel screen on a high resolution grid, and extending the hybrid screen design procedure to color by jointly optimizing the color screens using color DBS. For the multilevel screen, we show that the best choice for the core size critically depends on the bit depth and screen frequency. For the color hybrid screen, we demonstrate a signicant improvement in the highlights over halftones generated by independently designed screens. Index TermsColor halftoning, digital halftoning, direct binary search, human visual system model, hybrid screen, multilevel screen.

I. INTRODUCTION

IGITAL halftoning is the process of rendering a continuous-tone image with a limited number of tone levels. To create the impression of continuous tone, the halftone image contains high spatial frequency patterns of coarsely quantized pixels which are perceived as intermediate gray levels by virtue of the low pass ltering characteristic of the human visual system (HVS). The goal of digital halftoning is to generate a low bit-depth image that reproduces correct tone and detail of an original image without introducing any visible artifacts. Most halftoning algorithms fall into one of three categories: point processes (screening or dithering), neighborhood processes (error diffusion), and iterative algorithms [least squares and direct binary search (DBS)] [1]. Although the quality of the halftone image increases in this order, the computational

Manuscript received September 03, 2008; revised August 25, 2009. First published September 22, 2009; current version published January 15, 2010. This paper was presented in part at IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging 2007, Color Imaging XII: Processing, Hardcopy and Applications. This work was supported by the Hewlett-Packard Company. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. Gabriel Marcu. C. Lee is with Samsung Electronics, Co., Ltd, Yeongtong-Gu, Suwon-City, Gyeonggi-Do, 443-742, Korea (e-mail: chang3.lee@samsung.com). J. P. Allebach is with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1285 USA (e-mail: allebach@ecn. purdue.edu). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TIP.2009.2032941

complexity required to generate the halftone image also increases in the same order. Screening and error diffusion can be executed in real time, so they are widely used in many printers. The iterative algorithms cannot be directly implemented on a printer since they require too much computation. Nevertheless, iterative methods provide an important tool for the ofine design of more computationally efcient halftoning algorithms, such as screening [2][5], look-up-table based algorithms [6], or error diffusion [7]. In this paper, we consider the use of iterative methods to design screening algorithms. According to the textures that screens generate, they may be classied according to two separate characteristics: 1) whether they generate dispersed or clustered dots, and 2) whether the resulting textures are periodic or aperiodic. All four combinations are possible; and some screens, including the hybrid screen that is of primary intent in this paper, may generate halftone textures that exhibit certain characteristics at some gray levels and other characteristics at other gray levels. A clustered-dot screen produces a halftone texture consisting of clusters of individual printer addressable dots, which may form a periodic or aperiodic texture. Clustered-dot, periodic screens produce halftone textures with a periodic, grid-like structure. The frequency of the grid lines is referred to as the screen frequency. By varying the cluster size, the clustered-dot screen can produce a number of gray levels. This process is analogous to the use of amplitude modulation in communications systems. Hence, such screens are often referred to as AM screens. A dispersed-dot screen does not form clusters; it changes the density or frequency of dispersed printer dots to produce distinct gray levels. Again, by analogy to communications systems, such screens are commonly referred to as FM screens. Dot clusters are more stable than single isolated dots and produce less dot gain as a fraction of area coverage. For this reason, the clustered-dot screen has the advantage over the dispersed-dot screen on a rendering device whose output is unstable, such as a laser printer based on electrophotographic (EP) process technology. In contrast, an inkjet printer, which can easily generate stable, isolated dots, is a common application of the dispersed-dot screen. Dispersed-dot screens may generate either periodic or aperiodic textures. The best example of a periodic, dispersed-dot screen is the classic Bayer screen [8]. Aperiodic, dispersed-dot screens generate what is commonly referred to as blue noise textures [9], [10]. Perhaps the three best known methods for designing such screens are Mitsa and Parkers ACBNOM algorithm [11], Ulichneys void and cluster algorithm [12], and DBS [13]. Textures generated by the Bayer screen suffer from certain well-known artifacts [14]. Aperiodic, dispersed-dot screens diminish these artifacts, but textures generated by these screens may appear noisy, especially in the midtones.

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Despite the advantage of the periodic, clustered-dot screen discussed above for devices with poor stability, there are two major problems with this type of screen. The rst one is that it renders image detail poorly. To a rst approximation, a periodic, clustered-dot screening process may be viewed as a sampling process in which each dot cluster corresponds to a single sample from the continuous-tone image. Thus, the sampling frequency is the same as the screen frequency; and a higher screen frequency results in better detail rendition. When the clustered-dot screen is implemented with a digital printer, the screen frequency must be lower than the native printer resolution in order to form clusters. This limits the detail resolving capability of the periodic, clustered-dot screen. The second closely related problem is due to the limitation on the number of gray levels that the screen can produce. The basic periodic, clustered-dot screen consists of a periodic array of halftone cells, each of which contains the same number of printer addressable pixels and each of which develops a single clustered dot as the gray level, expressed in units of absorptance , ), increases. The number of distinct gray ( levels that the screen can generate is one more than the number of printer addressable pixels in the halftone cell. If the number of gray levels is insufcient, then contouring artifacts may be observed in regions where the gray levels are gradually changing. Moreover, these two problems are tightly coupled since there is a trade-off between the screen frequency and the number of realizable gray levels. If we increase the screen frequency to improve the capability to render detail, the halftone cell size decreases. As a result, the screen cannot produce a sufcient number of gray levels. On the other hand, if we increase the halftone cell size by decreasing the screen frequency, the capability to render detail will be degraded. Aperiodic, clustered-dot screens retain the advantages of aperiodic, dispersed-dot screens while generating halftone textures that are more consistently printable with inherently unstable technologies than are the textures generated by aperiodic, dispersed-dot screens. In particular, such screens do not exhibit a xed number of quantization levels and, hence, do not show contouring artifacts. The textures generated by these screens are commonly referred to as green noise. Lau et al. rst formalized the concept of green noise and proposed an algorithm to design such screens based on enforcing certain spatial-statistical characteristics of green noise [15], [16]. Ostromoukhov proposed a green noise screen design method based on stochastic seeding while traversing the screen array according to a Hilbert scan, followed by Delauney triangulation [17]. Damera-Venkata and Lin used the void-and-cluster algorithm with a donut lter to create green noise screens [18], [19]. Since green noise screens generate stochastically distributed dispersed dots in highlights that grow into clusters in the midtones, such screens are also described as AM-FM screens. The major weakness of aperiodic, clustered-dot screens is a greater level of noisiness relative to periodic, clustered-dot screens with the same scale of coarseness. To overcome the limitation with periodic, clustered-dot screens caused by the trade-off between screen frequency and the number of gray levels that can be rendered, a supercell approach has become popular [20]. In the supercell approach, what were halftone cells with a periodic conventional clustered-

Fig. 1. Constant gray patches of absorptance a = halftoned with supercells and hybrid screens. All patches are printed at 150 dpi. (a) Supercell with Bayer macroscreen. (b) Supercell with stochastic macroscreen (or hybrid screen with 1 1 core). (c) Hybrid screen with 2 2 core.

= 10 255 2

dot screen become microcells which are grouped together to form the new halftone cell or supercell. So, as the absorptance increases, multiple dot clusters will develop in each supercell. Unlike the conventional clustered-dot screen that grows all clusters simultaneously, the clusters in the microcells of the supercell can grow sequentially or a few at a time. Here, we denote by the microcell cluster growing sequence the dot turn-on sequence of the microcell. Also, we denote by the macrodot growing sequence or macroscreen the order in which microcell clusters grow in the supercell. By using the supercell approach, we can increase the number of realizable gray levels from the length of the microcell cluster growing sequence to the product of the lengths of the microcell cluster growing sequence and the macrodot growing sequence. This can be as large as the number of pixels in the supercell. Hence, without reducing the screen frequency, we can arbitrarily increase the number of gray levels by increasing the supercell size. The macrodot growing sequence has a major impact on the halftone quality in highlights. In this part of the tone scale, where dots are rst being placed in successive microcells, the halftone texture is similar to that generated by a conventional, dispersed-dot screen. In fact, the Bayer screen [8] is often used as the basis for the macrodot growing sequence. However, the resulting textures are much more visible than they are with a true dispersed-dot screen because the effective resolution of the halftoning process is equal to the microcell screen frequency, rather than the much higher native resolution of the printer, as would be the case for a true dispersed-dot screen. This exacerbates the visibility of certain objectionable, regular textures that are characteristic of the Bayer screen as shown in Fig. 1(a). A logical solution to this problem is to replace the Bayer screen as the source of the macrodot growing sequence by a stochastic, blue noise screen; and indeed several researchers have followed this approach [21], [22]. However, an artifact similar to that described above for the Bayer screen also occurs when a blue noise screen is used to control the macrodot growing sequence, as shown in Fig. 1(b). In this case, the missing dots create the impression of a maze in which parallel rows of the dots that are present form meandering paths. In fact, it can be shown on the basis of spectral analysis of the upsampling process by which the supercell screen highlight texture is generated from the underlying blue noise texture that the resulting supercell screen texture will not have a blue noise characteristic [2], [4]. The hybrid screen is a modied supercell approach proposed by Lin and Allebach that solves this problem in the highlights

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while preserving the advantage of the clustered-dot screen in the midtones [2], [4]. In the hybrid screen, a small region in each microcell is dened as a core. Inside the core, the original microcell cluster growing sequence is ignored. This allows the rst dot in each microcell to move around within the core from microcell to microcell within the supercell. By allowing this spatial freedom, the maze-like artifact can be eliminated and a stochastic-dot texture with frequency spectrum similar to that of blue noise can be generated as shown in Fig. 1(c). This blue-noise-like texture gradually evolves into a green-noise-like texture as the seed dot of each microcell starts to grow and become a dot cluster. The texture nally becomes a regular periodic, clustered-dot texture when every core is completely lled. Beyond this level, the clusters grow in a manner similar to the conventional clustered-dot screen, except that the macrodot growing sequence follows the rst dot turn-on sequence. DBS is used to design the cluster growing sequence within the cores of the microcells, as well as the overall macrodot growing sequence. If we design the microcell to have a dot-hole complementary symmetry, we can also dene a shadow core in the hole region and apply the same strategy to shadows. Our discussion of halftoning algorithms so far has presumed that the printer has only a binary output capability in which each printer-addressable pixel is either assigned a colorant dot or not assigned a colorant dot. However, laser electrophotographic printers are commonly designed with multilevel capability. This is generally achieved by either modulating the laser intensity to a xed number of different amplitude levels or by providing subpixel addressability in the laser scan direction, so that the laser beam may be turned on or off at fractional positions within a pixelthe dimensions of which are equal to the scan-line spacing. This technique is commonly referred to as pulse width modulation (PWM). With multilevel halftone systems, the halftone image is typically represented using 4 to 8 bits per pixel. With PWM systems at the high end of this range, 6 bits are commonly used to encode the pulse width and 2 bits are used to dene the justication of the subpixel-width pulse within the printer-addressable pixel. References [3] and [23] discuss approaches to multilevel halftoning with dispersed-dot, aperiodic textures. Both papers contain additional references to earlier papers that discuss this topic, as well. References [20] and [24] discuss multilevel halftoning with periodic, clustered-dot textures. If the number of amplitude levels is sufciently largesay in the range of 16 to 64, it is no longer necessary to depend on supercell techniques to provide an adequate number of levels to eliminate contouring artifacts even when each halftone cell contains only a small number of pixels, such as in the range 4 to 16. However, there are two important application domains where supercell techniques and in particular, the hybrid screen have proven to be especially important, even with electrophotographic systems that have multilevel capability. To understand the rst of these domains, we need to consider that there are two distinctly different approaches to implementing the entire imaging pipeline associated with the task of printing in a desktop or ofce environment. In the rst of these two approaches, commonly described as a controller-based or formatter-based architecture, the printer contains hardware and rmware (software) resources sufcient to interpret a high-level

page description language representation (such as Postscript or PDF) of the document, render it as an image, perform a number of color conversion tasks, and then nally halftone the page to be printed. In the second of these two approaches, all the tasks associated with the imaging pipeline are completed within the printer driver using the resources of the host computer. In this approach, known as host-based printing, the nal halftone image of the page must be transmitted from the host computer to the printer. At a typical printer resolution of 600 dots per inch (dpi), this image will contain over 100 Mpixels. It is in this latter domain of desktop or ofce printing that the hybrid screen has proven to be particularly valuable. Whereas a full PWM-based multilevel halftone image typically requires 1 byte/pixel for each color channel, the hybrid screen can potentially achieve this same, or at least an acceptable, level of image quality with only 2 to 1 bits per pixel for each color channel. This translates to an immediate reduction in le size and corresponding decrease in time to print a document by a factor of 4 to 8 . Host-based printers are typically found in the lowest part of the price range for a given manufacturers offering of laser printers. Within the context of desktop or ofce printing, the hybrid screen may still be benecial with a controller-based printer if the marking technology is such that isolated dots with size equal to a fraction of a pixel cannot be stably printed. In this case, reliance on full multilevel capability in the highlights will result in textures with a noisy appearance, whereas the hybrid screen will result in cleaner, less noisy textures. Ironically, we nd the second application domain for the hybrid screen at the opposite end of the price/performance range for laser printers. These systems, more properly referred to as digital presses, cost 100 times more than their low-end counterparts and print at speeds 5 greater on media that may be 4 larger in area. The issue here is throughput. At higher speeds, reduction in the amount of data (bytes/pixel) that must be processed internal to the press becomes critical, as does the inherent instability associated with running the marking engine at higher speeds. Use of the hybrid screen is benecial in terms of both these factors. In the few years since the hybrid screen was rst introduced [2], it has been implemented in both low-end and high-end laser printer products sold by at least two manufacturers. The original publication dened the framework for the hybrid screen, but did not include the details necessary for successful implementation of this technology. In the present paper, we provide that information. In particular, we describe a complete process for the design of the hybrid screen. We also introduce two approaches for the design of multilevel hybrid screens. We for the rst time explore the relationship between screen frequency and halftone bit depth and the best choice for the core size. Finally, we for the rst time show how improved highlight texture may be obtained by jointly designing the screens for separate color planes within the context of DBS. This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we discuss the printer model and HVS model, DBS, and screening. In Section III, we treat the bilevel hybrid screen design. Multilevel screen design follows in Section IV; and experimental results are presented in Section V. Joint color hybrid screen design

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using CDBS is explained in Section VI. Then, we draw our conclusions in Section VII. II. PRELIMINARIES In this section, we briey discuss our printer and HVS models, DBS, and screening. Here, we restrict our treatment of the HVS model to a single luminance channel HVS model. For DBS, we consider the monochrome DBS algorithm with a single change per visit to each pixel. Two extensions to DBS: DBS with multiple pixel changes and CDBS will be discussed in Sections IV and VI, respectively. A. Printer Model and HVS Model We use and to represent continuous and discrete spatial coordinates, respectively. The units and are inches and pixels, respectively. Let of be a continuous-tone image and be the halftone version of . Both and are expressed in units of absorptance takes on discrete where 0 is white and 1 is black. Hence, where is the values of number of gray levels, whereas or 1. Suppose we have an ideal continuous-tone printer which can produce a perfect square dot with absorptance equal to that of be the version of the discrete image pixel value. Let rendered by the ideal printer. Then can be written as (1) where is the spot prole function of the ideal is the distance between addressable dots. Thus, printer and . Likewise, and have the printer resolution the same relationship (2) For reasons of tractability, our model for the HVS is intended to capture only the most basic properties of the HVS that are of primary importance to the perception of halftone imagesnamely, the dependence of the contrast sensitivity function on spatial frequency. To accomplish this, we model the HVS as a linear, shift-invariant lter with a low pass characthe spatial HVS lter. Then the teristic. Let us denote by is obtained by convolving the rendered perceived image with image (3) where denotes 2-D convolution and is the perceived spot prole function of the ideal printer. Similarly (4) With a laser printer that has high resolution such as , the spot prole function is sufciently narrow that we can make the approximation compared to .

The HVS model is based on the contrast sensitivity function of the human visual system. For monochrome halftoning, only the luminance channel is used. Here we use the luminance contrast sensitivity function based on Nsnens model [25]. Kim and Allebach compared Nsnens model with three other HVS models and concluded that Nsnens model gave the best overall halftone quality when incorporated in the DBS algorithm based on [26]. The luminance spatial frequency response Nsnens model is given [25] by (5) , , , , is where the average luminance of the light reected from the print in , and are the spatial frequency coordinates in cycles/degree subtended at the retina. Taking the inverse continuous-space Fourier transform yields the HVS spatial lter , where (CSFT) of are degrees subtended at the retina. the units of Before transforming the HVS lter from the frequency domain to the spatial domain, we convert the units of cycles/degree subtended at the retina in (5) to the units of cycles/inch on the printed page. Note that inches on the paper viewed at a inches will subtend the angle degrees according distance to the following relationship: (6) Hence, the spatial frequency in cycles/inch is given by , where . Then and the spatial lter can be written as

(7) In Section II-B, we shall discuss the fact that the mean squared through its autocorrelation function error only depends on (8) evaluated at points on the printer lattice, i.e., . B. Direct Binary Search DBS is an iterative halftoning algorithm that generates a halftone image by minimizing the total mean squared error between a perceived continuous-tone image and a perceived halftone image [27]. The perceived images are created by ltering the original images using the HVS lter. Starting from an initial halftone image, every pixel in the image is visited one by one. For the visit to each pixel, we consider trial changes to the current pixel by either modifying the state of the current pixel (toggle) or exchanging the current pixel with one of its neighboring pixels that has a different state (swap). If any of these trial changes decreases the total error, that change which decreases it the most is accepted and the halftone is updated. After each pixel in the image has been visited, the process is repeated starting again with the rst pixel. Each such

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cycle constitutes an iteration. The algorithm has converged to a local minimum if no change is kept in a single iteration. Although a global minimum is not guaranteed, the algorithm produces a good quality halftone in most cases [28]. between the continuous-tone image The perceived error and the halftone image is given by (9) where [28] by . The mean squared error is given The dot turn-on sequence, or index matrix puted by can be comFig. 2. Microcell design for z ; and w ; . (a) Screen tile vectors. (b) CHPC. (c) Quantize tile vectors along the halftone grid. (d) Copy boundaries to the other side of the CPHC.

= [4 1]

= [01 4]

(10) where . In the case of a toggle, the trial halftone image toggle at can be represented by

(17) after the and the screen or threshold matrix (11) is given as (18) The halftone image is given as image after screening the continuous-tone if otherwise. III. BILEVEL HYBRID SCREEN DESIGN A. Basic Parameters In general, a periodic screen can be associated with two vectors and as shown in Fig. 2(a). Let us dene these vectors as the screen tile vectors and the parallelogram created by these vectors as the continuous-parameter halftone cell (CPHC). Suppose we shift and copy the CPHC by , , then we can cover the whole spatial domain. The screen tile vectors are restricted to be integer in a bilevel screen design. In a mulpairs, that is, tilevel screen design, this restriction will be relaxed so that a fractional number is allowed for the components in the printer scan direction. In order to span the whole space with the given vectors, and must be linearly independent. We further assume that lies in the lower right quadrant including the axis , and lies in the upper right quadrant inaxis , as shown in Fig. 2. If two cluding the , then we call the tile vectors are orthogonal, that is, , then we call the screen screen an orthogonal screen. If a nonorthogonal screen. Fig. 2 shows an example of an orthogand . onal screen with screen tile vectors . The periodicity matrix is dened as Throughout this paper, the screen angle is dened as the angle axis. In the case of an orthogbetween a tile vector and the onal screen, we dene the screen angle as the angle created by and the axis, so . In the vector . We also dene and as the screen freFig. 2, quencies in the directions of and , respectively. The screen and frequencies are given as , where the units of and are lines/inch (lpi). For most orthogonal screens, is the 90-degree rotated

where is the absorptance change at , so if is changed from 0 to 1 (toggle on), and 1 if is changed from 1 to 0 (toggle off). The trial error change is given [28] by (12) If , the total error is reduced. If, among the trial changes considered, the toggle operation decreases the total error the is updated as most, the change is accepted and (13) In the case of a swap, the current pixel value and the neighboring pixel value are exchanged. If and are being swapped, the swap equations parallel to (11)(13) are given [28] as (14) (15) (16) where and are the absorptance changes at pixel , respectively. Here, . C. Screening Screening is a point process which compares an input value to a spatially varying threshold. If the input value is greater than the threshold, the pixel is set to black. Otherwise, it is set to white. Thresholds are usually stored in a 2-D rectangular array , where and represent the height and width of size of the array, respectively. A continuous-tone input image of constant gray is rendered to one of the halftone textures that corresponds to an absorptance . Let us dene the dot level as the family of binary textures used to prole function represent each gray level . In screening, if a dot is present at for level , it must be present for all darker levels . for . This is called Thus, the stacking constraint. and

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version of , so denote the screen frequency as In Fig. 2, and B. Microcell and Supercell Design

. In such cases, we . when .

Once the screen tile vectors are set and the basic parameters have been computed, the rst step is to determine the shape of the block whose boundary lies on the grid and which roughly matches the CPHC. We dene this block to be the microcell. A supercell is a block created by grouping these microcells together. The shape of the microcell can be determined by following three steps. starting from 1) CPHC: We draw two tile vectors and as shown in Fig. 2(b). The parallelogram the origin on dened by and is the CPHC. In Fig. 2(b), the CPHC . is the parallelogram 2) Line quantization: Since the microcell boundaries must be drawn along the grid, we quantize the tile vector along the grid by connecting two end points of the vector. In and Fig. 2(c), the two bold boundaries connecting show these cell boundaries. It is worth noting that the boundary can follow any grid lines as long as the boundary connects the start and end points of the vector, so the shape can be arbitrary. 3) Boundary copy: Copy each side of the boundary obtained in the previous step to the other side of the parallelogram. by will create the In Fig. 2(d), shifting boundary cell boundary . Likewise, shifting by will create . Finally, the block enclosed by the bold the boundary is the microcell. boundaries that connect in the microcell is equal to the area The number of pixels of the CPHC, and is given as (20) . In Fig. 2, The number of output levels per microcell is . The supercell is constructed by tiling microcells. Since the microcell shape is not rectangular, the boundary of the supercell is not rectangular, either. However, in most screening implementations, it is convenient to store the screen in a 2-D rectangular array form. Hence, we create the equivalent rectangular screen from the nonrectangular screen using the method described by Holladay [29]. We dene the basic screen block (BSB) as the smallest rectangle that can be tiled in the vertical and the width of and horizontal directions. The height the BSB is given [29] as (21) For the vectors and given in Fig. 2, shows the BSB for the given tile vectors. Finally, the screen height and the width by . Fig. 3 can be obtained

Fig. 3. Basic screen block of hybrid screen for z ; and w ; ; (a) shows a 2 2 square highlight core and (b) shows a 1 4 line highlight core. Both screens have 2 2 square shadow cores.

= [4 1]

= [01 4]

(22)

where and are arbitrarily chosen integer multiplication factors in the horizontal and vertical directions, respecand are tively. To hide repeating patterns in the output, generally set to be more than a hundred pixels. The next step is to create the highlight core and shadow core regions for the stochastic-dot texture. The core is the region where the original microcell cluster growing sequence is ignored and is chosen by DBS instead. In determining the core region, both the size and shape must be taken into consideration. The core shape is determined in conformance with the . Fig. 3 shows overall microcell cluster growing sequence two different examples of highlight cores. In Fig. 3(a), each microcell has a 2 2 square core. This is suitable for growing a conventional round dot cluster after the cores are all lled. In Fig. 3(b), each microcell has a 1 4 line core. This is suitable for growing a line pattern after the cores are all lled. The 2 2 core will create a better stochastic-dot texture than the 1 4 line core in highlights. However, the line pattern is preferred over the round dot-cluster pattern in certain situations. For example, one may wish to generate screens that satisfy a moir-free condition for two different colorants, e.g., cyan and magenta. One way to achieve this is to create two orthogonal line screens that originate from the same screen tile vector. Provided that the screen tile vectors are orthogonal, we can create two line screens that intersect each other perpendicularly so that the moir-free condition is satised. A screen with a round dot-cluster growing pattern cannot be implemented in this way since two orthogonal frequencies are inherently present for each screen. The second parameter to consider is the core size. The core size determines the spatial freedom of the seed dot. If the core is large, we can have a good pattern in the highlight levels but the subsequent gray levels tend to become noisier as the halftone texture grows toward a periodic pattern. If it is small, the halftone textures in highlights are prone to a visible maze-like artifact. Hence, a rule of thumb for determining the core size is to make it as small as possible until the screen creates visible artifacts in the highlights. For a 600 dpi printer, the typical range of the screen frequency is 140 to 190 lpi, so the number of pixels in the microcell ranges from 10 to 18. Therefore, a core size of four pixels is the most probable choice. We can also dene a shadow core to create stochastic-hole textures in shadows using dot-hole complementary symmetry [30]. Since, due to dot gain, the shadow region is almost lled up by surrounding dots even before dots are placed in the shadow

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core region, it is reasonable to select a compact square or round hole shape for the shadow core. The shadow core does not have as large an impact on shadow textures as the highlight core does on highlight textures. Hence, if there is a conict between selecting the highlight core and the shadow core in the microcell, it is better to focus on the shape of the highlight core to obtain the best results. After determining the core regions, the nal step is to deter. For the hymine the microcell cluster growing sequence brid screen, we need only consider the microcell cluster growing for the midtone region since the sequences in sequence the highlight and shadow core regions are determined by DBS. Although there is no denitive rule for determining the mi, several strategies are crocell cluster growing sequence useful. Understand the effect of tiling: It is impossible to visualize the impact of the dot clusters growing and the hole clusters shrinking within a single microcell. One method to visualize the resulting halftone textures is to draw at least a 3 3 array of microcells, then grow the clusters in all microcells simultaneously and observe how the shapes of the dot cluster in the center microcell and the neighboring hole clusters change. Once the center dot cluster begins to touch the neighboring dot clusters, one can visualize the shape of the hole clusters. By this method, one can understand how hole clusters are emerging as dot clusters grow. Achieving complementary symmetry at 50% of the cluster growth is a good strategy [30] whenever it is possible. Select growing patterns: To take advantage of the clustered-dot design, it is desirable to make the perimeter of the dot cluster small. Round and circular dot clusters usually print well when well-separated, but become noisy when dot clusters begin to touch. An alternative is to grow the dot clusters toward a line shape. The output will be rather unstable before the line is formed. However, once the line is formed, it is quite robust to printer instability. Consider dot gain: Dot gain must be taken into account since it can create a large difference between the ideal printer output and the real printer output. As mentioned before, the hole cluster usually appears much smaller in the real printer output than it appears in the ideal printer output. Also it is highly probable that small gaps in the ideal output will be lled up in the real output.

needed to place a single dot in every microcell. Hence, the total number of output levels is given by

(23) and (24) To generate the index matrix , we generate each level of the dot prole function in sequential order. To , we start from create and add dots to it. Let us calculate the number of dots added per contiguous levels, a single level. During any sequence of dot is added to every microcell in the screen. The number of dots added is equal to the number of microcells in the screen, which . It follows that . Since we denote by dots are added throughout levels, dots are added at each level, provided the same number of dots are added at each level. The added dots are then moved around under certain constraints to improve the overall texture. During this operation, only the added dots are allowed to change their positions; and cannot the dots that were already present in move due to the stacking constraint. pixels. GenSuppose that the highlight core consists of erating the dot prole function in the highlight core region de, . The design of the nes levels, , , corresponds rst to placing the rst dot in every microcell. This process is called , FM seeding. The design of the remaining levels , corresponds to growing the seed dot placed in each core until it completely lls up the core region. This process is called AM growing. We use a constrained DBS algorithm to design the dot prole function in the highlights. It is modied from the original DBS algorithm to restrict dot placement. In the constrained DBS algorithm, dots are only placed inside the highlight core regions. The number of dots in each core is also restricted so that dots , the are evenly distributed in the screen. For maximum number of dots allowed in any core is restricted to . Since every core in already has dots, the difference between the number at least of dots in any two cores is at most one dot. An additional constraint is needed for dot clustering if the core is large. Suppose that we put two dots in a core that is larger than 2 2. The original DBS algorithm tends to separate dots, so it is likely that the two dots will be isolated inside the core and will fail to form a cluster. To prevent such an occurrence, we add a constrained dot growing rule to the original DBS algorithm for the AM growing process. Generating a level of the dot prole function using the constrained DBS algorithm is composed of two steps. , we randomly 1) Random toggle: To generate toggle on dots within the . At each core regions starting from and are updated according to (11) and toggle, (13).

C. Dot Prole Function Generation for Highlights and Shadows Before generating highlight textures using DBS, we must rst determine the desired number of output levels . Normally, the input image pixel value has 256 levels ranging from . However, in order to correct for the nonlinear relationship between the absorptance of the ideal halftoning process and the absorptance measured from the printed page, is often set to be more than a thousand levels. During the calibration process, a subset of 256 levels is selected from these the length of the macrodot growing levels. Let us denote by . It is equal to the number of levels sequence

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2) Constrained DBS swap: After randomly turning on dots, we apply the constrained DBS swap-only algorithm to the added dots so that each dot can move around inside the core region of the current microcell in which it is located or jump to the core region of a neighboring microcell to improve the overall texture. For each trial swap, we calcuaccording to (15). If any , the trial swap late that decreases the error the most is accepted; and and are updated according to (14) and (16). The becomes smaller then a threshold algorithm stops if and/or the number of iterations exceeds the maximum allowed number of iterations. After generating all levels of the dot prole function in the highlights, we generate the index matrix for the highlight core region if otherwise (25) where is the highlight core region. The shadow core can be designed by following a similar procedure. The difference is that the design objects are now changed from dots to holes. Hence, we add holes level-by-level starting from solid black. If the shapes of the highlight core and the shadow core are the same, there is an alternative approach: we can create the dot prole function in the shadows by inverting and offsetting the dot prole function in the highlights to t into the shadow core region. In this case, the index matrix for the shadow core region is given by if otherwise. (26) Here, is the offset vector from the highlight core to the is the shadow core region. shadow core; and D. Screen Generation To generate the dot prole function for the midtones, we need to determine the macrodot growing index . We use the rst dot turn-on sequence determined by the FM seeding process as the macrodot growing index. If the rst dot in a microcell is turned on at level , then all pixels in that microcell have macrodot growing index . Now every pixel in the midtone region has two indices: one is the microcell cluster growing index and the other one , is the macrodot growing index where and are the number of pixels in the highlight and shadow cores, respectively. Then the index matrix for the midtone region is given by if otherwise (27)

is designed using DBS as just degrowing sequence scribed here in Section III-D. Finally, the overall index matrix can be generated by summing the three index matrices (28) and , reThe highlight and shadow index matrices spectively, are determined according to the procedure given in is given by Section III-C; and the midtone index matrix (27) above. The screen or threshold matrix can be comusing (18). puted from IV. MULTILEVEL HYBRID SCREEN DESIGN As discussed in Section I, it is becoming increasingly common for electrophotographic printers to support multilevel output to improve image quality by using a pixel modulation technique. For those printers, multilevel rendering must be exploited to create a multilevel halftone (multitone) image. In screening, this can be accomplished by comparing the input image pixel value to the thresholds of multiple screens to determine the output. In this section, we propose two different approaches for generating a multilevel hybrid screen based on a printer with PWM capability. The rst approach is to extend the predesigned bilevel hybrid screen design. The extension is straightforward and is possible when the screen tile vectors are integers. It will be explained in Section IV-B. The second approach is to design the screen based on noninteger screen tile vectors using the high resolution grid. In the latter case, the horizontal component of either tile vector is allowed to be any fractional number that corresponds to the high resolution grid. This will be explained in Section IV-C. Screens designed by either method can be implemented using (29) and (30) below, as will be discussed shortly. So there is no difference between the two approaches in terms of implementation complexity. The design process for Method 2 is more complex than that for Method 1, since DBS must be implemented on a sub-pixel raster, with constraints to account for the fact that PWM is performed in the scan direction only and to account for potential restriction to the justication of the sub-pixel laser pulses. This increases the complexity of the design code, as well as the computation required to execute the DBS algorithm. However, the screen design is a one-time task that is performed off-line. Thus, these factors may not be signicant. With monochrome screens, we have not observed a signicant quality difference between halftone textures resulting from screens designed by the two methods. However, Method 2 supports noninteger screen tile vectors. This increases the number of options for tile vector sets for color screens, and may lead to signicantly better moir resistance. As discussed elsewhere in this paper, the hybrid screen can be implemented with any set of tile vectors for a color screen set. Selection of these tile vectors is beyond the scope of this paper. A. Preliminaries The bit depth is the number of bits required to represent the output level of a single pixel. Let us denote by the number . If the output of possible output levels per pixel, then

is the midtone region. Here, the microcell cluster where is designed manually according to growing sequence rules such as those discussed in Section III-B; and the macrodot

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Fig. 4. Justication modes.

levels are generated by dividing each pixel into subpixels of equal width, then each output pixel takes on a partial-dot ab. The number of sorptance [3]. screens needed to produce output levels per pixel is , where , be the multilevel screen Let index matrices and be the number of output levels. Then the are given by multilevel screens (29) where if if if . the bilevel screen rst nd the interval index , and the halftoning operation is
Fig. 5. Multilevel screen extension of 3 3 screens; (a) shows the partial dot growing sequence using (34) by selecting all levels of the bilevel dot prole function as anchor levels; (b) shows the partial dot growing sequence using (31) by selecting only ve anchor levels from the full set of 10 levels of the binary dot prole function.

(30)

lect

anchor levels from the dot prole function of , where . For each index , we , of

Each output pixel of the multitone image is determined by two parameters: partial-dot width and justication. Justication is the offset of the partial dot from the native printer resolution grid. Fig. 4 shows an example of four justication modes for a half-pixel dot: center, left, right, and split. Justication is determined after screening. One method to determine the justication of the current pixel is to use the information of the partial-dot width of the left and right pixels. For example, if one of the neighboring pixels is a full dot and the pixel on the other side is not, then the current pixel is justied toward the full dot. If both neighboring pixels are full dots, then the current pixel is justied as split. If one of the neighboring pixels is blank and the pixel on the other side is a partial dot, then the current pixel is justied toward the partial dot. If both pixels are blank or partial dots, then the current pixel is justied as center. B. Method 1: Extension From a Bilevel Hybrid Screen One approach to build a multilevel screen is to generate it by extending a bilevel screen. This approach is applicable to any bilevel screen and is not restricted to the hybrid screen. The main idea of this extension is to interpolate the dot prole function of the bilevel screen to generate in-between multitone textures. However, instead of directly interpolating halftone textures of adjacent levels in the bilevel dot prole function, our implementation has the ability to interpolate halftone textures of only selected levels in the bilevel dot prole function to provide exibility in realizing various partial-dot growing sequences. We explain this extension by introducing the concept of anchor levels. Anchor levels are the selected halftone textures chosen from the dot prole function of the bilevel screen. Partial dots exist only between the anchor levels; and they must become full dots when they reach the next anchor level. By changing the selection of anchor levels, we can create various partial dot growing sequences as shown in Fig. 5(a) and (b). Suppose we have a bilevel screen index matrix and a threshold matrix with output levels. We se-

belongs. A partial dot starts to grow the interval to which when the input pixel value becomes greater at the location , and it grows to a full dot before the than . The th input pixel value reaches screen index matrix can be computed as

(31) The rst term on the right side of (31) is the newly assigned index for the anchor level since the number of output levels is increased from to . The second term is the offset for the th index matrix on the interval , and the last term is the offset of on the interval . Finally, we can calculate the threshold matrices as (32)

(33) For one partial dot growing sequence, we can select all as anchor levels. In this case, , , and . So (34) Fig. 5(a) shows an example of (34) for 3 3 screens with 3-level output screens. Fig. 5(b) shows another partial dot growing sequence for the same index matrix obtained by selecting ve anchor levels from the dot prole function. One can observe that those two growing sequences have different growing patterns at

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Fig. 6. (a) Microcell on a high resolution grid. (b) DBS swap with multiple pixel changes.

several levels. Comparing Fig. 5(a) and (b), we can observe that the latter partial-dot growing sequence produces a more rounded dot cluster with a more compact boundary than the former partial-dot growing sequence. C. Method 2: Multilevel Screen Design on High Resolution Grid The second method to design the multilevel screen is to build it on a high resolution grid. Fig. 6(a) shows an example of a microcell for , where the output partial dots are 0%, 50%, and 100%. The resolution in the printer scan direction is doubled compared to the normal resolution. Here we use the normal resolution grid to represent the grid for a bilevel screen, and the high resolution grid to represent a grid for a multilevel screen. In Fig. 6(a), the tile vectors consist of noninteger numand . Although the screen angle bers and the screen resolution can be calculated using these vectors, it is better to compute the number of pixels and the screen size as integers that correspond to the high resolution grid. Hence, we dene new tile vectors which correspond to the high resoluand . Then tion grid, the number of pixels per microcell is

Once the parameters are set, the rest of the design procedure is similar to the bilevel hybrid screen design procedure except the design of the stochastic pattern in the highlights and shadows. The bilevel DBS algorithm is not directly applicable to multilevel screen design. Lin and Allebach proposed a multilevel DBS algorithm assuming that the output pixel can have multilevel states [3]. This assumption is valid for a device that produces multiple levels of absorptances, such as a laser printer which changes the dot absorptance by modulating the laser beam intensity. However, since a printer with PWM capability realizes the multilevel output by modulating the dot width, it is more appropriate to modify the DBS algorithm so that it can model the subpixel-width dot movement on the high resolution grid. Since the unit pixel on the high resolution grid is a rectangle elongated in the process direction, we increase the resolution of the grid in the process direction from the native printer resolution to the resolution in the scan direction to make each pixel shape square again. Then we try to toggle or swap pixel blocks together as a single unit. Kacker et the al. has developed a version of the DBS algorithm which can be used for multiple pixel changes [31]. Based on that algorithm, we can write the DBS toggle and swap equations for pixel blocks. Suppose that we toggle the pixel block at or swap the pixel blocks at and , the , , and in (11)(13) and (15) and equations for (16) can be rewritten as

(38)

(39)

(35) . where We can also compute the BSB on the high resolution grid. In order to align the BSB boundary with the normal resolution . Hence, the grid, the BSB width should be a multiple of and width of the BSB are given by height (36) (37) and , so and . It is worth noting that the unit of the size is the number of pixels. Since the pixel shape is no longer a square, times greater than the BSB the physical BSB height is width. Hence, the physical BSB size for the microcells shown , where in Fig. 6(a) is is the size of a square pixel. In Fig. 6(a),

(40) , and and are the absorptance changes at where pixels and , respectively. Therefore, and in a toggle operation, and in a swap operation. and Fig. 6(b) illustrates the swapping of 2 1 blocks at . Fig. 7 shows the benets of this multilevel DBS. Fig. 7(a) is . Althe pattern generated from original DBS when though each pixel should represent a one-third width partial dot on the high resolution grid, the shape information is not taken into account and every pixel is assumed to be square. The dots are uniformly distributed as expected. However, if we resize the image so that each dot in the image corresponds to a one-third partial dot, the image in Fig. 7(a) should be either compressed

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Fig. 7. Comparison of the original DBS pattern and the modied DBS pattern when q 1 = 3. (a) Original DBS; (b) original DBS, scaled; (c) modied DBS. (a) is the pattern generated from original DBS assuming that every pixel is square. For the multilevel screen design, (a) should be stretched 3 in the vertical direction so that each dot corresponds to a 1/3 partial dot. The result is shown in (b); (c) is designed by modied DBS to handle multiple pixel changes after increasing the vertical resolution. Note that (a) and (c) are visually uniform whereas (b) is not.

three times in the scan direction or stretched three times in the process direction. The stretched pattern is shown in Fig. 7(b). Due to the stretch, the dots are no longer uniformly distributed. Fig. 7(c) is the pattern generated from multilevel DBS by increasing the vertical resolution and moving a 3 1 block as a basic unit. We can observe that the uniformity is much improved compared to Fig. 7(b). V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS In this section, we compare halftone textures generated by a green noise screen and our hybrid screen. We then examine the relationship between core size and bit depth for our hybrid screen with a stochastic macroscreen, using a Bayer macro1 core as the reference. All images were screen with a 1 printed using a 600 600-dpi laser EP printer equipped with 6-bit PWM and 2-bit justication capability. The printed images were scanned at 2100 dpi and are shown in Figs. 811 at 600 dpi; so the magnication is 3.5 . For the periodic, clustered-dot screens, the screen tile vectors and , resulting in screen angle and freare , respectively, with quencies of 14.0 and dots in each microcell. For the hybrid screens, we used a 61-level DBS macroscreen, so the number of output levels is levels. A round-cluster growing strategy was adopted for the microscreen cluster growing rule. First, we compare the hybrid screen to a green noise screen. For this purpose, we use Damera-Venkata and Lins AM-FM screen [18] implemented with a difference of Gaussian donut , where is the average dislter tance between neighboring minority pixels. We explored a range and of choices for the lter parameter values and chose as yielding the best match, in terms of overall coarseness or scale of the resulting halftone textures, to those produced by the hybrid screen, designed as described in the paragraph above. Both screens were designed to yield a binary (1-bit) halftone output. Fig. 8 shows a continuous-tone serpentine ramp with gray levels ranging from 0 to 128 halftoned with both screens. Note that the gray level 60 is the stochastic-to-periodic pattern transition level for the hybrid screen, which corresponds to the left area of the second and third stripes of the serpentine ramp. The ramps appear quite similar in the highlights. However, as we

Fig. 8. Ramps halftoned with a hybrid screen and Damera-Venkata and Lins AM-FM screen. (a) Hybrid screen; (b) Damera-Venkata and Lins AM-FM screen. Both (a) and (b) show a similar blue-noise-like texture in the highlights. However, when viewed from a distance at which individual dots can barely be resolved, (a) is much less grainy in the midtones than (b) due to its regular structure.

Fig. 9. Ramps halftoned with a supercell with Bayer macroscreen and bilevel hybrid screens. (a) Supercell with Bayer macroscreen - 1 bpp, bilevel output; (b) hybrid screen with 1 1 core - 1 bpp, bilevel output; (c) hybrid screen with 2 2 core - 1 bpp, bilevel output. The core size of (b) is 1 1 and (c) is 2 2; (a) and (b) show more noticeable texture and dot withdrawal patterns than (c).

move into the midtones, the textures generated by the green noise screen appear much noisier than those generated by the

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hybrid screen, when viewed at an appropriate distance. For this reason, green noise screens have not been the preferred choice with laser EP printers. Next, we compare the results of hybrid screens and the conventional supercell screen with a Bayer macroscreen for bilevel and multilevel cases. We select two hybrid screens with different core sizes. The rst one consists of microcells with 1 1 cores. In this case, the microcell cluster growing sequence is xed and the stochastic pattern is only achieved by the DBS macroscreen. This is known to have a maze-like artifact in the bilevel output case [2], [4]. The other one is a (2 2)-core hybrid screen. In this case, DBS is used to design both the macroscreen and the microcell cluster growing sequence inside the cores. All three screens have the same tile vectors, as specied at the beginning of this section. As also specied earlier, the hybrid screens use a 61-level DBS macroscreen. For the supercell screen with the Bayer macroscreen, we use a 16 16, 256-level Bayer macroscreen; so the number of output levels is levels. Figs. 911 show the ramps halftoned with these screens. For our continuous-tone input ramp, we use a folded serpentine ramp with gray levels ranging from 0 to 64. Again, the gray level 60 is the stochastic-to-periodic pattern transition level for the (2 2)-core hybrid screen. For the Bayer macroscreen and the (1 1)-core hybrid screen, this transition occurs at level 15. Fig. 9 shows the gray ramp images halftoned with bilevel screens. The three ramp images are halftoned with a supercell with a Bayer macroscreen, a (1 1)-core hybrid screen, and a (2 2)-core hybrid screen, respectively. The texture of the Bayer screen is the most noticeable among three halftone ramps. The (1 1)-core hybrid screen also shows visible patterns as it lls up the 1 1 core regions. The dot withdrawal pattern before completely lling the 1 1 core regions is also noticeable. The (2 2)-core hybrid screen starts from a blue-noise-like texture in highlights, then evolves smoothly to a regular periodic pattern as the 2 2 cores are lled up. The visibility of the textures observed in the hybrid screens is reduced by the DBS design of the macroscreen sequence. For the hybrid screen with 2 2 cores, the visibility of the textures is further reduced by the DBS design of the microcell cluster growing sequence inside the core. Figs. 10 and 11 show the results for multilevel screens. We test multilevel screens with different numbers of output levels: 2-bpp 3-output level screens, and 4-bpp 16-output level screens. To directly compare these results with the bilevel screen results, the screen specications are kept the same as for the bilevel screen. Since the screen vectors are integers, we use (31) to create multilevel screens with 18 anchor levels. Each anchor level corresponds to a binary pattern that is the same in every microcell. This approach corresponds to the rst multilevel hybrid screen design method described in Section IV-B. Results for the second method described in Section IV-C are not included in this paper since we found that the halftone quality of the monochrome screen produced by both methods is similar. As mentioned earlier, the advantage of the second method over the rst method is not the halftone quality of monochrome screens but the possibility to improve the halftone quality of color screens by providing more choices in screen tile vector selection.

Fig. 10. Same ramp as in Fig. 9 halftoned with 2-bpp 3-output level multilevel screens and printed by a printer with PWM capability. (a) Supercell with Bayer macroscreen - 2 bpp, 3 level output; (b) hybrid screen with 1 1 core - 2 bpp, 3 level output; (c) hybrid screen with 2 2 core - 2 bpp, 3 level output. The partial dots used here are 0%, 50%, and 100%. In contrast with Fig. 9, the texture artifacts appearing in (a) and (b) are less visible and the texture is much smoother overall than in Fig. 9 due to the partial dot development. Still, (a) and (b) show weak but visible textures in the highlight region where the rst dots are developed, but (c) does not. Beyond the highlights, all the images are quite comparable in terms of quality.

Fig. 11. Same ramp as in Fig. 9 halftoned with 4-bpp 16-output level multilevel smooth screens. (a) Supercell with Bayer macroscreen - 4 bpp, 16 level output; (b) hybrid screen with 1 1 core - 4 bpp, 16 level output; (c) hybrid screen with 2 2 core, - 4 bpp, 16 level output. At this high bit depth, the quality of (a) and (b) becomes almost the same, while (c) looks noisier than (a) and (b) due to its more highly stochastic structure.

Fig. 10 shows the ramp images halftoned with 2-bpp 3-output level screens. The partial dots used here are 0%, 50%, and 100%. By using partial dots, the quality of the Bayer screen and the (1 1)-core hybrid screen is greatly improved. However, we can still see weak but visible textures in (a) and (b) in the extreme highlight part where the rst dots are developed. The (2 2)-core hybrid screen has a good stochastic-dot texture in the extreme highlight part. Except for that region, the quality of all

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images is quite comparable. Overall, the quality improvement for the (2 2)-core hybrid screen in Fig. 10 is less dramatic than in Fig. 9. Finally, if the number of output levels increases to 16 levels as shown in Fig. 11, the quality of the Bayer screen and the (1 1)-core hybrid screen becomes quite good, while the (2 2)-core hybrid screen looks noisier than the other two because of its highly stochastic structure. Although we have not included gures in this paper, we also designed and tested higher frequency screens, e.g., 190-lpi 2)-core hybrid screen still shows the best screens. The (2 texture in the highlights for the bilevel case. However, as the bit depth increases, the halftone quality of the (2 2)-core hybrid screen degrades even faster than for the 150-lpi screen case, since the stochastic-to-periodic pattern transition level occurs much later in higher frequency screens. These experimental results indicate that as we start to increase the bit depth or the screen frequency, we must reduce the stochastic characteristics of the hybrid screen by limiting the core size (probably to 2 1 or 1 1). This is because the advantage yielded by the stochastic pattern in the highlights is restricted only to the extreme highlights, whereas the noisy texture which appears during the growing of the clusters becomes more problematic. In this case, it is better to design the screen with a smaller core so that it quickly makes the transition to a periodic clustered-dot structure that will create a cleaner and smoother texture.

Fig. 12. Joint screen design framework.

VI. COLOR HYBRID SCREEN DESIGN The conventional way to design color screens is to use a rotated screen for each colorant plane [32]. To minimize interference between the screens, the screen angles are chosen to be separated from each other as maximally as possible. Since yellow colorant is less noticeable than the other colorants, the screen is often set to 0 . Normally, the screen anangle for yellow gles for the cyan , magenta , and black planes are chosen so that screens that are adjacent in angle are separated by approximately 30 . Since the contrast sensitivity of the human viewer decreases most rapidly with increasing spatial frequency is usually set to 45 , at the 45 angle, the screen angle for are set to 15 and 75 . After screen and angles for and angles and frequencies are determined, each screen is designed independently. To further improve the quality of color screens, there has been some research on jointly designing the screens [5], [30], [33]. Wang proposed a moir-free screen design by selecting screen tile vectors that satisfy a moir-free condition [33]. Baqai and Allebach proposed a systematic method for designing moirand rosette-free clustered-dot color screens [30] based on computer search to minimize a cost function that incorporates models for the printer and the human viewer. These works are focused on screen tile vector selection. Lin and Allebach proposed an FM screen design framework which jointly optimizes planes together by controlling the dot placement the [5]. They designed the screens along the neutral axis. For each gray level, they evaluated all 15 halftone patterns , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and to design the screens.

It is important to note that the hybrid screening technology may be applied to any set of screen tile vectors, whether they are based on conventional rotated orthogonal screens or nonorthogonal screens chosen to satisfy a moir-free condition. However, the procedures described earlier in this paper for designing the macroscreen sequence and the sequence for lling the cores in the supercell do not account for the visual interaction of color planes in the highlights. In this section, we incorporate the joint screen design scheme into the stochastic pattern design in highlights to further improve the color hybrid screen. We take an approach similar to Lins framework. However, instead of evaluating all 15 images with three channels, which adds up to 45 weighting coefcients to determine, we focus on the two colorants and . This is inspired by the research of Lee and Allebach [34] which showed that the joint optimization of these two colorants gives as good a result in overall halftone quality as a design based on joint optimization of the , , and screens. with Thus, we evaluate the two primary color planes and with three monochrome channels, and one joint color plane channels. Another difference between our framework and that used by Lin and Allebach lies in the selection of the color space. space, which is not suitable for Instead of using the CIE the DBS framework due to its inherent nonlinearity, we adopt color DBS (CDBS) using the Flohr HVS model in the framework [35]. A. Joint Screen Design Framework Using CDBS Fig. 12 shows the framework for the joint screen design. The functions and are the th level of the dot prole functions for and . and Starting from , we randomly toggle on dots on each plane and create the initial th level of dot prole functions and . Then the error images are obtained according to (41)

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Fig. 13.

CM ramps halftoned with (a) separately designed C and M screens and (b) jointly designed C and M screens. All images are printed at 150 dpi.
are the constant gray input images and . Next, we create three error images , in the space ltered by the corresponding HVS lter according to whether it is a luminance channel or a chrominance channel. In the Flohr HVS model, the luminance spatial frequency response is given by Nsnens model in (5); and the chrominance spatial frequency response is based on an approximation by Kolpatzik and Bouman [37] to experimental data collected by Mullen [38] that is given by (45) where , , and are the spatial frequency coordinates in cycles/degree subtended at the retina. After ltering the error images, the total error is obtained by summing the errors from all the planes. First, we calculate the by summing the errors error of the joint plane (46) in the joint color plane where and are the weighting factor and the error, respectively, from each channel of the joint color plane. It has been reported that produces good results [35]. Finally, we compute the total error by summing the errors from the three planes (43) (47) where and are the weighting factor and the error, respectively, from each plane. As is the case with DBS, we can implement an efcient in CDBS [35]. The trial CDBS method for calculating and is swap operation on accepted whenever . B. Experimental Results Fig. 13 shows the ramps halftoned by the and screens. The gray value ranges from 1 to 32 on a scale of 0 to 255. The screen size for both and is 119 119; and the screen frequency is 145.5 lpi. The angle for is 14.0 and the

where ,

(42)

to , then We convert these images from space, which is denoted by the linearized CIE [36]. To transform to , we use the relations

to

where , , and are the tristimulus values of the reference space can be stimulus. Then the error images in the written as (44) where represents the color space transformation from to . consists of three channels , , Each . For the and planes, we only evaluate the and luminance channel. For the joint color plane, we evaluate all , , three channels. Hence, a total of ve channels , , and are evaluated. Each channel is

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angle for is 76.0 . Fig. 13(a) shows the ramp halftoned with separately designed screens; and Fig. 13(b) shows the ramp halftoned with jointly designed screens. We observe that the dot distribution of Fig. 13(b) is much more uniform than that of Fig. 13(a). Although the monochrome halftone images are not shown here, the jointly designed screens maintain a good halftone texture for each color plane comparable to that yielded by the separately designed screens. It should be noted that the procedure, described in this section for joint design of color screen highlight texture using DBS with a cost function based on a spatiochromatic model for the human visual system, does not account for the possibility of color misregistration. Color plane misregistration is a common problem with laser EP printer mechanisms. The rst step to addressing this issue would be to choose the tile vectors to explicitly minimize moir susceptibility. Several different approaches to this problem have been proposed in the literature [30], [32], [33]. This will impact highlight textures via the location of the cores for each color plane. Second, one would want to modify the cost function (47) used by DBS to assign dot placement in the cores for each color plane, to account for color plane misregistration. This could be done , say , in (41) by replacing one of the color planes by , where is a random displacement, and then taking the statistical expectation of the error in (47) with re. This would spect to an appropriate probability density for be analogous to the approach found by Lee and Allebach [39] to effectively account for the random displacement of individual inkjet drops in DBS halftones. How effectively it could account for color plane misregistration in laser EP printer mechanisms remains to be investigated. VII. CONCLUSION The hybrid screen offers a compelling solution to the need for a high quality, cost-effective halftoning algorithm in several important application domains for laser electrophotographic printers. It leverages the strength of the model-based direct binary search (DBS) optimization framework to yield signicantly better image quality than a conventional supercell halftone screen. In this paper, we have for the rst time provided a systematic procedure for design of the hybrid screen including multilevel and color screens. We have illustrated the relationship between screen frequency and bit depth and the size of the core which is a key feature of the hybrid screen. Finally, we have demonstrated that improved highlight texture can be obtained by joint screen design using a color DBS framework. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank N. Damera-Venkata for helpful discussions regarding the implementation of his AM-FM screen design algorithm and comparison of the results with those generated by the hybrid screen. REFERENCES
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[30] F. A. Baqai and J. P. Allebach, Computer-aided design of clustered-dot color screens based on a human visual system model, Proc. IEEE, vol. 90, no. 1, pp. 104122, Jan. 2002. [31] D. Kacker, T. Camis, and J. P. Allebach, Electrophtographic process embedded in direct binary search, IEEE Trans. Image Process., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 243257, Mar. 2002. [32] I. Amidror, R. D. Hersch, and V. Ostromoukhov, Spectral analysis and minimization of moire patterns in color separation, J. Electron. Imag., vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 295317, Jul. 1994. [33] S.-G. Wang, Z. Fan, and Z. Wen, Non-orthogonal screen and its ap plication in moire-free halftoning, in Proc. SPIE, Color Imaging VIII: Processing, Hardcopy, and Applications, 2003, vol. 5008, pp. 399408. [34] J.-H. Lee and J. P. Allebach, Colorant-based direct binary search halftoning, J. Electron. Imag., vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 517527, October 2002. [35] A. U. Agar and J. P. Allebach, Model-based color halftoning using direct binary search, IEEE Trans. Image Process., vol. 14, no. 12, pp. 19451959, Dec. 2005. [36] T. J. Flohr, B. W. Kolpatzik, R. Balasubramanian, D. A. Carrara, C. A. Bouman, and J. P. Allebach, Model-based color image quantization, in Proc. SPIE, Human Vision, Visual Processing, and Digital Display IV, 1993, vol. 1913, pp. 270281. [37] B. Kolpatzik and C. Bouman, Optimized error diffusion for image display, J. Electron. Imag., vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 277292, July 1992. [38] K. Mullen, The contrast sensitivity of human color vision to red-green and blue-yellow chromatic gratings, Physiol., vol. 359, pp. 381400, 1985. [39] J.-H. Lee and J. P. Allebach, Inkjet pirnter model-based halftoning, IEEE Trans. Image Process., vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 674689, May 2005. Changhyung Lee received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1997 and 2000, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 2008. From 2000 to 2002, he was a full engineering staff member at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Daejon, Korea. In 2009, he joined at Samsung Electronics, Co., Ltd., Suwon, Korea, where he is a Senior Engineer in the Digital Printing Division. His research interests include image rendering and image enhancement.

Jan P. Allebach (F91) received the B.S.E.E. from the University of Delaware, Newark, and the Ph.D. degree from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 1972 and 1976, respectively. He was on the faculty at the University of Delaware from 1976 to 1983. Since 1983, he has been at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, where he is the Hewlett-Packard Distinguished Michael J. and Katherine R. Birck Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His current research interests include image rendering, image quality, color imaging and color measurement, printer and sensor forensics, and digital publishing. Prof. Allebach is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T), and SPIE. He has been especially active with the IEEE Signal Processing Society and IS&T. He has served as Distinguished/Visiting Lecturer for both societies, and has served as an ofcer and on the Board of Directors of both societies. He is a past Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING and the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING. He is presently Editor for the IS&T/SPIE Journal of Electronic Imaging. He received the Senior (best paper) Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the Bowman Award from IS&T. In 2004, he was named Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year by IS&T and SPIE. In 2007, he was named Honorary Member of IS&T, the highest award that IS&T bestows. He is the recipient of ve teaching awards from Purdue University. From the Purdue College of Engineering, he is co-recipient of the 2006 Team Award in recognition of his long-term work with HP, and recipient of the 2008 Mentoring Excellence Award. He also received the 2008 Purdue Sigma Xi Faculty Research Award.