Printers use halftoning to render printed pages. This process is useful for many printing technologies which are binary in nature, as it allows the printer to deposit the ink as series of dots of constant darkness. Indeed, many of printing pipelines are based on this 1-bit framework; this unfortunately raises a critical problem when image processing operations that require the original 8-bit image must be performed. In this situation, what is required is the reconstruction of the 8-bit image from its halftoned version, a process referred to as "inverse halftoning". In this paper, we present a technique for fast inverse halftoning which given a dithered image together with the dithering mask that created it, approximates the original 8-bit image. The technique is elegant, and allows for generalizations to other inverse problems in which the exact details of the forward process are known. The algorithm is light computationally, and has been tested in practice. Results are shown, demonstrating the algorithm's promise.
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