Compressible halftoning

We present a technique for converting continuous gray-scale images to halftone (black and white) images that lend themselves to lossless data compression with compression factor of three or better. Our method involves using novel halftone mask structures which consist of non-repeated threshold values. We have versions of both dispersed-dot and clustered-dot masks, which produce acceptable images for a variety of printers. Using the masks as a sort key allows us to reversibly rearrange the image pixels and partition them into groups with a highly skewed distribution allowing Huffman compression coding techniques to be applied. This gives compression ratios in the range 3:1 to 10:1