Lossy Compression of Stochastic Halftones with JBIG2

The JBIG2 standard supports lossless and lossy coding models for text, halftone, and generic regions in bi-level images. For the JBIG2 lossy halftone compression mode, halftones are descreened before encoding. Previous JBIG2 descreening implementations produce high-quality images for clustered dot halftones at high compression rates but signi cantly degrade the image quality for stochastic halftones, even at much lower rates. In this paper, we develop (1) a exible, computationally e cient, JBIG2-compliant method for compressing stochastic halftones that reduces noise, artifacts, and blurring; (2) quality measures for linear and nonlinear distortion in compressed halftones; and (3) rate-distortion tradeo s for the encoder parameters.