COLOR IMAGE QUANTIZATION AND DITHERING METHOD BASED ON HUMAN VISUAL-SYSTEM CHARACTERISTICS

New methods for both color palette design and dithering based on human visual system (HVS) characteristics are proposed. Color quantization for palette design uses the relative visual sensitivity and spatial ma sking effect of HVS. The dithering operation for printing uses nonline ar quantization, which considers the overlapping phenomena among neigh bor printing dots, and then a modified dot-diffusion algorithm is foll owed to compensate the degradation produced in the quantization proces s. The proposed techniques can produce high-quality images in low-bit color devices.