Aliasing and quantization in the efficient display of images

A class of image representations that are appropriate for display of continuous-tone imagery with a wide range of digital devices is analyzed. Special cases include pulse-amplitude modulation, ordered dither, and pulse-surface-area modulation. Quantization and Fourier domain aliasing are shown to be 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.