Multi-Level Confined Error Diffusion Algorithm for Flat Panel Display

The reduction of a structural pattern at specific gray levels or at the special condition of image data has mainly been discussed in digital halftone methods. This problem is more severe in some flat panel displays because their black levels typically are brighter than other displays blocks. The authors proposed an advanced confined error diffusion (ACED) algorithm which was a well-organized halftone algorithm for flat panel devices. In this paper, we extend the ACED algorithm to the multilevel systems, which are capable of displaying more than 2 levels. Our extension has two merits for the hardware implementation. First, it can be processed in real time using the look-up table based method. The second one is the flexibility of selecting the used gray level. This paper discusses the performance of the proposed algorithms with experimental results for natural test images. key words: multilevel halftone, digital color image halftone, error diffusion, flat panel display