Plane-dependent Error Diffusion on a GPU

In this paper, we study a plane-dependent technique that reduces dot-on-dot printing in color images, and apply this technique to a GPU-based error diffusion halftoning algorithm. We design image quality metrics to preserve mean color and minimize colorant overlaps. We further use randomized intra-plane error filter weights to break periodic structures. Our GPU implementation achieves a processing speed of 200 MegaPixels/second for RGB color images, and a speedup of 30 - 37x over a multi-threaded implementation on a dual-core CPU. Since the GPU implementation is memory bound, we essentially get the image quality benefits for free by adding arithmetic complexities for inter-plane dependency and error filter weights randomization.