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A Differentiable Halftoning Framework Based on Deep Self-supervised Learning
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    Abstract:

    To address the limitations of current digital halftoning algorithms, such as slow processing speed and suboptimal halftoning effects, a data-driven halftoning framework is proposed. By introducing the Gumbel-Softmax reparameterization strategy, the non-differentiability issue caused by discrete halftone selection is resolved, enabling unbiased gradient estimation during network backpropagation. To further enhance the halftoning effects, a novel blue noise loss function is designed to optimize the distribution of halftone dots. Additionally, a Patch-wise Confidence Aggregation module is introduced to incorporate spatial correlations between pixels, allowing the network to focus more on pixel interactions during training. Based on these strategies, a label-free, self-supervised, differentiable halftoning framework is constructed by optimizing the expected value of the halftone quality metric. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method, without requiring image labels, can generate high-quality halftone images and maintain high processing speed and low parameter complexity, effectively preserving local structural information and texture details. Moreover, this framework can be flexibly extended to multi-level halftoning to accommodate the requirements of multi-level printheads.

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  • Received:
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  • Online: August 29,2025
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