Print quality assessment for stochastic clustered-dot halftones using compactness measures

Most electro-photographic printers prefer clustered-dot halftone textures for rendering smooth and stable prints. Clustered-dot halftone patterns can be periodic or aperiodic. As periodic clustered-dot halftone can lead to undesirable moiré patterns, stochastic clustered-dot halftone textures are more preferred. There are available different screening methods to generate stochastic clustered-dot halftone textures but there are no standard print quality assessment measures that can be easily used for quantitatively evaluating and comparing different stochastic clustered-dot halftoning methods. We explore the use of compactness measures for this purpose, and also propose a new compactness measure that seems good metric to quantitatively compare and assess the print quality of different stochastic clustered-dot halftoning methods. Using the proposed metric, we compare three different stochastic clustered-dot halftoning methods, and our results are almost in agreement with psychophysical experiments results reported earlier.