Dithering with blue noise

Author

Ulichney, Robert A.

Author_Institution

Digital Equipment Corp., Hudson, MA, USA

Volume

76

Issue

1

fYear

1988

fDate

1/1/1988 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

56

Lastpage

79

Abstract

Digital halftoning, also referred to as spatial dithering is a method of rendering the illusion of continuous-tone pictures on displays that are capable of only producing binary picture elements. The concept of blue noise-high-frequency white noise-is introduced and found to have desirable properties for halftoning. Efficient algorithms for dithering with blue noise, based on perturbed error diffusion, are developed. The nature of dither patterns produced is extensively examined in the frequency domain. Metrics for analyzing the frequency content of aperiodic patterns for both rectangular and hexagonal grids are developed; blue-noise dithering is found to be ideally suited for rectangular grids. Several carefully selected digitally produced examples are included

Keywords

picture processing; white noise; aperiodic patterns; binary picture elements; blue noise; continuous-tone pictures; frequency content; frequency domain; halftoning; hexagonal grids; high-frequency white noise; perturbed error diffusion; rectangular grids; spatial dithering; 1f noise; Baseband; Colored noise; Displays; Filters; Frequency domain analysis; Low-frequency noise; Pattern analysis; Sampling methods; White noise;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Proceedings of the IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9219

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/5.3288

Filename

3288