Gray Resolution Enhancement Anti-aliasing Technology (GRET) for High Speed Printing

Abstract

In order to improve the output image quality of binary text and graphics (even for binary information that are buried within a document which also has gray level information), a gray level resolution enhancement anti-aliasing method (GRET) that uses feature extraction and a rule-based decision matrix for edge enhancement (anti-aliasing) with multi-level (LED) output printing capability in a electrophotographic system is described. A pipelined architecture (with a conflict resolution priority-sorting scheme in the decision matrix) was used to enable all the decision operations to be performed at the same time (for efficient high-speed operation) and was implemented in an ASIC. Further, a scalable multiple chip architecture with overlapping pixels at the end of the image segments was created to enable enhancement operation for wider width and higher speed printing.