Dithering method for reproducing smoothly changing tones and fine details of natural images on woven fabric

This paper introduces novel methods to improve the aesthetic appearance of rendered grayscale digital images on woven fabric by smoothly changing tones and improving the reproducibility of fine details. The methods are based on stepping dithering, a recently developed dithering method for automatically generating jacquard weave patterns for arbitrary given images. The existing stepping dithering method suffers from two problems. The first problem is the visually unappealing repetition of patterns for input images containing low frequency, smooth gradation regions. The second problem is the low reproducibility of small structures with high frequency relative to mask size. This paper proposes new methods for faithfully rendering arbitrary natural images on jacquard fabric by solving the pattern repetition and low reproducibility problems. The new methods combine two approaches. The first problem is addressed by optimizing the distribution of thresholds in dither masks, while the second problem is addressed by adopting a dynamic binarizing process for an appropriate area of the stepping dither mask. The experiments described herein show that the proposed method successfully improves the appearance of the resulting woven fabric.