Fast halftoning of MPEG video for bi-tonal displays

Greater network connectivity allows multimedia content to be delivered to a wide range of end-hosts with various compute and display capabilities. In many cases the format of the delivered multimedia must be processed to adapt it for use on the end-host. For low-cost devices with limited compute and display power, this adaptation must be within the capability of the device. In this paper we address one such adaptation -that of halftoning MPEG video for viewing on low-cost devices with bi-tonal display. In particular, we demonstrate a halftoning strategy that is fast and simple, requiring only integer math, bit shifts, and a look-up table. In addition, our approach can be used with the SNR scalability feature in MPEG-4 to allow efficient bandwidth consumption while providing fast bi-tonal display adaptation.