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Lecture 3 Halftoning

Digital halftoning techniques allow grayscale images to be reproduced using only black and white ink or pixels. There are two main techniques: patterning replaces each pixel with a small binary pattern or font to simulate grayscale, while dithering thresholds each pixel against a dither matrix pattern to determine if it is printed black or white. Both techniques average the dots visually to recreate intermediate shades of gray. Newspaper photos use halftoning with a screen of 85 lines per inch to represent grayscale with black ink dots.

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195 views14 pages

Lecture 3 Halftoning

Digital halftoning techniques allow grayscale images to be reproduced using only black and white ink or pixels. There are two main techniques: patterning replaces each pixel with a small binary pattern or font to simulate grayscale, while dithering thresholds each pixel against a dither matrix pattern to determine if it is printed black or white. Both techniques average the dots visually to recreate intermediate shades of gray. Newspaper photos use halftoning with a screen of 85 lines per inch to represent grayscale with black ink dots.

Uploaded by

raja haris
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Digital Image Processing

Halftoning

Dr. Muhammad Jehanzeb

1
Halftoning

• Newspaper photographs simulate a greyscale, despite the


fact that they have been printed using only black ink.
• A newspaper picture is, in fact, made up of a pattern of
tiny black dots of varying size.
• The human visual system has a tendency to average
brightness over small areas, so the black dots and their
white background merge and are perceived as an
intermediate shade of grey.

2
Halftoning (cont)

• The process of generating a binary pattern of black


and white dots from an image is termed halftoning.

• In traditional newspaper and magazine production,


this process is carried out photographically by
projection of a transparency through a 'halftone
screen' onto film.

3
Halftoning (cont)

• The screen is a glass plate with a grid etched into it.


• Different screens can be used to control the size
and shape of the dots in the halftoned image.
• A fine grid, with a 'screen frequency' of 200-300
lines per inch, gives the image quality necessary for
magazine production.
• A screen frequency of 85 lines per inch is deemed
acceptable for newspapers.
4
Patterning
A simple digital halftoning technique known as
patterning involves replacing each pixel by a pattern
taken from a 'binary font'.
• Fonts made up of ten 3 x 3 matrices of pixels.

• This font can be used to print an image consisting


of ten grey levels.

5
Patterning

A 3 x 3 binary font for printing a greyscale.

6
Patterning

• A pixel with a grey level of 0 is replaced by a


matrix containing no white pixels; a pixel with a
grey level of 1 is replaced by a matrix containing a
single white pixel; and so on.

• Note that, since we are replacing each pixel by a 3


x 3 block of pixels, both the width and the height of
the image increase by a factor of 3.

7
Patterning

Example of halftoning using the binary font depicted

Orignal image halftoned image


8
Dithering

• Another technique for digital halftoning is


dithering.
• Dithering can be accomplished by thresholding the
image against a dither matrix.
• The first two dither matrices, rescaled for
application to 8-bit images, are

9
Dithering

10
Dithering

11
Dithering
• The elements of a dither matrix are thresholds.
• The matrix is laid like a tile over the entire image
and each pixel value is compared with the
corresponding threshold from the matrix.
• The pixel becomes white if its value exceeds the
threshold or black otherwise.
• This approach produces an output image with the
same dimensions as the input image, but with less
detail visible.
12
Dithering
• Algorithm to halftone an image using a dither
matrix.
for all x & y do
if f(x,y) > m(x,y) then
g(x,y) = white
else
g(x,y) = black
end if
End for
13
Dithering

Halftoning with dither matrices. (a) Input image. (b) Halftoned image using D 1. (c) Halftoned image using D2
14

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