Digital Halftone Database (DHD): A Comprehensive Analysis on Halftone Types

Digital halftoning is a technique to represent the binary approximation of continuous tone image meant for printing. There are wide variety of halftone methods available based on ordered dithering, error distribution, dot diffusion and iterative approaches. This paper emphasizes on the development of a digital halftone database (DHD) consisting of 23 varieties of halftone methods. Moreover, the detailed elaboration on implementation of each technique and its comparison study is carried out. The critical halftone characteristics such as homogeneity, isotropy, directional artifacts and its impact to the pattern quality are comprehensively analyzed using the stochastic halftone statistics. Finally, a complete performance comparison based on rendered image quality, spatial and spectral statistics of stochastic process parameters are analyzed. The DHD database consisting of more than 4500 halftone images along with some of its source code is made free access for scientific study and purposes.