Digital halftoning space filling curves

Claim 1

A digital halftoning method for creating a gray-scale monochrome reproduction of a source image in electronic display and printing systems, said method comprising the steps of: subdividing the source image into regions based on a trace of a space filling curve, further subdividing each of said regions into equally sized pixels, the region defining a pixel cluster, each of said regions including at least one pixel, scanning said source image along the trace of said space filling curve to visit all pixels of said source image in a sequential order, calculating an average image intensity for each region of said source image, establishing a range of pixel cluster intensity levels based on a number of said pixels in said cluster, a particular intensity level of said pixel cluster being defined by the ratio of the number of pixels in said cluster being in an ON state and the total number of pixels in said cluster, the spatial configuration of said ON state pixels producing a dot pattern having an intensity level corresponding to the average image intensity for that region, and generating said dot pattern for each of said pixel clusters by activating individual ones of said pixels to said ON state in an order corresponding with said sequential order along the trace of said space filling curve through each of said pixels of said region with the option of distributing said ON pixels around a point of highest intensity of the source image in the region.