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 significantly degrade the image quality for stochastic halftones, even at much lower rates. In this paper, we develop (1) a flexible, computationally efficient, 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 tradeoffs for the encoder parameters.