Novel Stacking and Boundary Enhanced Hybrid Halftone Screen for Laser Printers

Digital halftoning is a common technique used in printing to produce high-quality printouts, but current methods based on iterative and dual-mode techniques have limitations in terms of quality. These methods often create artifacts in transition regions between smooth and edge regions, and struggle to produce high-quality results for textured or finely detailed images. As a solution, this study proposes a new halftoning technique that produces enhanced clustered-dot patterns suitable for laser printers. The proposed method incorporates a new stacking constraint approach to address boundary issues between low and high-frequency regions, as well as an adaptive variance-based halftone scheme to improve overall image quality. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that this new technique outperforms existing methods and is an excellent choice for versatile printing applications that rely on laser printers.