High-speed first- and second-order frequency modulated halftoning

Abstract

Halftoning is a crucial part of image reproduction in print. First-order FM halftones, in which the single dots are stochastically distributed, is widely used in printing technologies, such as inkjet, that are able to stably print isolated dispersed dots. Printers, such as laser printers, that utilize electrophotographic technology are not able to stably print the isolated dots and therefore use clustered-dot halftones. Periodic clustered-dot, i.e. AM, halftones are commonly used in this type of printers but they suffer from undesired periodic interference pattern called moiré. An alternative solution is to use second-order FM halftones in which the clustered dots are stochastically distributed. The iterative halftoning techniques, that usually result in well-formed halftones, are operating on the whole input image and require extensive computations and thereby are very slow when the input image is large. In this paper, we introduce a method to generate image independent threshold matrices for first and second-order FM halftoning. The first-order threshold matrix generates well-formed halftone patterns and the second-order FM threshold matrix can be adjusted to produce clustered-dots of different size, shape and alignment. Using predetermined and image independent threshold matrices makes the proposed halftoning method a point-by-point process and thereby very fast.