Patent ID: 7518618

Claim:
An image processing method for rendering anti-aliased pixels within a digital image, comprising: receiving a digital image into an image processing system, a) selecting a target pixel location within the digital image; b) observing a set of pixels within a pixel observation window superimposed on the digital image, relative to the target pixel location; c) generating a plurality of sums of weighted pixels values where each sum is taken over a vector of pixels in the pixel observation window, d) generating vector-sum-to-vector-sum differences using the plurality of sums, where the differences are taken for neighboring pairs of vectors, where the pairs of vectors are of at least two different orientations; e) generating an edge-slope state for each pair of neighboring vectors of pixels; f) generating a polarity of edge-state codes from a plurality of edge slope states; g) generating edge-identification codes from the plurality of edge-state codes using at least one look-up table; and, h) utilizing the edge-identification codes to select and apply anti-aliased rendering to the digital image at the target pixel: and, repeating steps a) through h) above until all pixel locations of the digital image have been targeted, and the resulting processed image from repeating those steps, is printed by a print engine.