Ranked dither for high-quality robust printing.

A robust parallelized halftoning method is proposed that is insensitive to dot loss, which can be a problem with xerographic and high-resolution printing. The method uses standard clustered-dot dither for smooth image blocks but uses the rankings of dither thresholds to halftone image blocks with high spatial activity. Experiments compare the ranked dither to dither, error diffusion, and green-noise error diffusion for four-color printing using standard clustered-dot dither masks at standard angles for the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black planes, respectively.