ALIASING AND QUANTIZATION IN THE EFFICIENT DISPLAY OF IMAGES

An analysis is made of a class of image representations that are appropriate for display for continuous-tone imagery with a wide range of digital devices. Special cases include pulse-amplitude modulation, ordered dither, and pulse-surface-area modulation. It is shown that quantization and Fourier domain aliasing are important factors in the degradations introduced by the nonlinear display process. The severity of these degradations may be minimized by proper design of the dot profile. Using a simple measure of image quality, the required information density and display resolution are calculated as a function of the number of display luminance levels for a well-known dot profile. Some experimental results are also presented.