Abstract
Structure-aware halftoning technique is one of the state-of-the-art algorithms for generating structure-preserving bitonal images. However, the slow optimization process prohibits its real-time application. This is due to its high computational cost of similarity measurement and iterative refinement. Unfortunately, the structure-aware halftoning cannot be straightforwardly parallelized due to its data dependency nature. In this paper, we propose a parallel algorithm to boost the optimization of the structure-aware halftoning. Our main idea is to exploit the spatial independence during the evaluation of the objective function and temporal independence among the iterations. Specifically, we introduce a parallel Poisson-disk algorithm during the selection of pixel swaps, which guarantees the independency between parallel processes. Graphics processing unit (GPU) implementation of the technique leads to a significant speedup without sacrificing the quality. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed parallel algorithm in generating structure-preserving bitonal images with much less time, especially for large images.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all reviewers for their valuable suggestions to improve the paper. This work was supported in part by grants from Hong Kong RGC General Research Fund (Project No. CUHK 417411) and CUHK SHIAE Project Funding (Project No. SHIAE-MMT-P2-11).
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Wu, H., Wong, TT. & Heng, PA. Parallel structure-aware halftoning. Multimed Tools Appl 67, 529–547 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-012-1048-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-012-1048-6