Stochastic screen halftoning combines the speed of ordered dither and high quality of error diffusion. The general approach to stochastic screen design employs either spatial domain or frequency domain filtering to generate binary patterns with "blue noise" characteristic at each gray level, which can be summed to form a single threshold array. In this paper, we will propose a novel technique to design stochastic screens using an error diffusion approach called symmetric error compensation (SEC) [1], where all neighbors of the current pixel are involved in the computation. The screen is still designed at each gray level, but each level is constructed using SEC. Typically, SEC is used to identify those pixels to be removed or added for building neighbor binary patterns. The processing sequence for SEC is determined by a distance variable for each unprocessed pixel. The screen from this method will be compared with the Blue Noise Mask[2], which is the prototypical stochastic screen gener...