Non-Photorealistic Computer Graphics Library

Artistic Halftoning - Between Technology and Art

Author(s): Victor Ostromoukhov.
Proceedings: SPIE Vol. 3963, pp. 489--509, 2000.
[BibTeX]

Abstract:
Halftoning, a technique for producing of an illusion of continuous tones on bi-level devices is widely used in today's printing industry. Different variants of halftoning - clustered and dispersed dither, error-diffusion, blue-noise mask, stochastic clustered dithering - have been extensively studied during last thirty years. In this paper, we focus our attention on different artistic halftoning techniques developed at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland). First, we explore Artistic Screening, a library-based approach, which has been presented at SIGGRAPH95. Contour-based generation of halftone screens effectively provides a new layer of information. We show how this layer of information can be used to convey artistic and cultural elements related to the content of the reproduced images. Artistic Screening is basically black-and-white technique. Multicolor and Artistic Dithering, presented at SIGGRAPH99, extends it to multiple colors. This technique permits to print with non-standard colors such as opaque or semi-opaque inks, using traditional or artistic screens of arbitrary complexity. Finally, we draw a way of extension of traditional dithering to purely artistic domain: Digital Facial Engraving presented at SIGGRAPH99. We illustrate the introduced technique by a set of black/white and color engravings.