SVG Digital Halftoning

Digital halftoning refers to the process of converting a continuous-tone image or photograph into a pattern of black and white picture elements for reproduction by a binary display device such as an ink jet printer, which can only choose to print or not print dots. The human visual, acting like a low-pass filter, blurs these printed and not printed dots together to create the illusion of continuous shades of gray. Typical halftoning algorithms produce bitmaps as output. However, there are cases when scalable halftone patterns would be useful.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector image format for two-dimensional graphics with support for interactivity and animation and thus obvious choice for scalable graphics. The project aims to create SVG equivalents of standard halftone patterns. These would allow a lower resolution grayscale image to be approximated by an infinite resolution monochrome vector image.