A new progressive coding scheme for halftone dithered images using bit-interleaving

A novel progressive coding scheme is presented for the efficient display of dithered images. Dithered images are the results of thresholding original gray-level images with dithering screens. After the preprocessing of bit-interleaving, this algorithm utilizes the characteristic of reordered image to determine the transmitting order and then progressively reconstructs the dithered image. In addition, the dithered images are further compressed by lossy and lossless procedures. The experimental results demonstrate high-quality reconstructions while maintaining low transmitted bit rates. Moreover, an objective error criterion obtained by LMS optimization is also presented in this study. As documented in the experiments, the error criterion is quite consistent to the basic characteristic of human visual system. (c) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.