Colorblind-friendly Halftoning

Abstract

Most images are natural images and most of them are still delivered in printed form nowadays. Halftoning is a critical process for printing natural color images. However, conventional colorblind aids do not make use of the halftoning process directly to produce colorblind-friendly image prints. In this paper, a halftoning algorithm is proposed to reduce the color distortion of an image print in the view of a colorblind person and embed hints in the image print for a colorblind person to distinguish the confusing colors. To people with normal vision, the color halftone looks the same as the original image when it is viewed at a reasonable distance, which is not achievable when conventional techniques such as recoloring and pattern overlaying are used to produce a color print for the colorblind. Besides, no dedicated hardware is required to view the printed image.