Stochastic clustered-dot screen design for improved smoothness

Printers employing electrophotographic technology typically use clustered-dot screening to avoid potential artifacts caused by unstable dot rendering. Periodic clustered-dot screens are quite smooth, but also suffer from periodic moiré artifacts due to interference with other color channels. Stochastic, clustered-dot screens provide an alternative solution. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for stochastic, clustered-dot screen design based on Direct Binary Search (DBS). The method differs from the conventional DBS in its use of a modified cost metric which was derived in an earlier work from using different filters in the initialization and update phases of DBS. The objective of the chosen approach is to design screen for improved print smoothness by generating a homogeneous distribution of compact, uniformly-sized clusters. The results include halftone of a screened folded-ramp, compared against a screen designed with a previous method.