Inverse Halftoning Based on the Bayesian Theorem

This study proposes a method which can generate high quality inverse halftone images from halftone images. This method can be employed prior to any signal processing over a halftone image or the inverse halftoning used in JBIG2. The proposed method utilizes the least-mean-square (LMS) algorithm to establish a relationship between the current processing position and its corresponding neighboring positions in each type of halftone image, including direct binary search, error diffusion, dot diffusion, and ordered dithering. After which, a referenced region called a support region (SR) is used to extract features. The SR can be obtained by relabeling the LMS-trained filters with the order of importance. Moreover, the probability of black pixel occurrence is considered as a feature in this work. According to this feature, the probabilities of all possible grayscale values at the current processing position can be obtained by the Bayesian theorem. Consequently, the final output at this position is the grayscale value with the highest probability. Experimental results show that the proposed method offers better visual quality than that of Mese-Vaidyanathan´s and Chang ´s methods in terms of human-visual peak signal-to-noise ratio (HPSNR). In addition, the memory consumption is also superior to Mese-Vaidyanathan´s method.