In electrophotographic printing, a periodic clustered-dot halftone pattern is preferred for a smooth and stable result. In addition, the screen frequency should be high enough to minimize the visibility of the halftone textures and to ensure good detail rendition. However, at these frequencies, the halftone cell may contain too few pixels to provide a sufficient number of distinct gray levels. This will result in contouring and posterization. The traditional solution is to grow the clusters asynchronously within a repeating block of clusters known as a supercell. The growth of each individual cluster is governed by a microscreen. The order in which the clusters grow within the supercell is determined by a macroscreen. Typically, the macroscreen is a recursive pattern due to Bayer. In highlights and shadows, this ordering results in visible artifacts. Replacing the Bayer screen by a stochastic macroscreen eliminates these artifacts, but results in new artifacts. In this paper, we propose a new
composite screen architecture that employs multiple microscreens and multiple macroscreens in the highlights and shadows. These screens are jointly designed by using the direct binary search (DBS) algorithm.
Screening is an efficient halftoning algorithm that is easy to implement. With multilevel devices, there is a potential to improve the overall image quality by using multilevel screening, which allows us to choose among multiple native tones at each addressable pixel. In this paper, we propose a methodology for multilevel screen design using Direct Binary Search. We refer to one period of the screen as a multitone cell. We define a multitone schedule, which for each absorptance level specifies the fraction of each native tone used in the multitone cell. Traditional multitoning uses only one native tone in smooth areas corresponding to absorptance values near the native tones, an approach which introduces contouring artifacts. To reduce contouring, we employ schedules that use more than one native tone at each absorptance level. Based on the multitone schedule, multitone patterns are designed level-by-level by adding native tones under the stacking constraint. At each level, the spatial arrangement of the native tones is determined by a modified DBS search. We explore several different multitone schedules that illustrate the image quality tradeoffs in multitone screen design.
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