From Paul Cole
The law gets into a mess when a court does the right things for the wrong reasons.
By way of introduction, the present proceedings concern a method for the production of halftone images created at the University of Rochester, and the following image and background information were downloaded from their website:
Printing devices have long used the technique of halftoning to render the appearance of shades of gray using dot patterns. But high-quality halftones required an exasperating amount of time for printout. Drs. Kevin Parker and Theophano Mitsa developed Blue Noise Mask (BNM), a novel approach to providing high-quality halftones many times faster than the best algorithms available in the late 1980s. Dr. Parker, an expert in the field of medical imaging, had noticed that printouts from his team’s diagnostic equipment were slow and plagued by distracting “noise” patterns called image artifacts. The researchers were unable to tell whether a spot on a picture represented an incipient tumor or an artifact added to the image during printing. For a faster, more accurate way to render the pictures, they conceptualized pictures as being composed of a fine mosaic of black and white dots. This fine mosaic pattern was mathematically constructed into a Blue Noise Mask. After a computer calculates the optimum mask for a printing device, the pre-built mask is stored in the printer’s software to produce halftones almost instantly. For color printers, the mask also halves the number of bits needed to produce a high-quality image, permitting major savings in printing speeds and computer memory.
Researchers at the University of Rochester designed the mask with substantial computer power and several years of work. The BNM was introduced to graphics and other industries in 1991. At that time BNM was a leap forward in halftoning technology. BNM was the first method to combine high quality with virtually instantaneous halftoning.
