Patent ID: 8451502

Claim:
A method of halftoning an image wherein a source file that represents the image in the form of a first pixel array, in which at least one input colour value that is given by a first number of bits is assigned to each pixel, is electronically processed to compute an output file in the form of a second pixel array in which at least one output colour value that is given by a second number of bits, said second number being smaller than the first number, is assigned to each pixel of the second pixel array, wherein the processing is performed in a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), wherein the first pixel array is loaded into a two-dimensional input texture in the GPU, and wherein a plurality of colour values are assigned to each pixel in the first pixel array, and, in order to accommodate the colour values in the input texture, this texture is expanded in one dimension by a factor corresponding to the number of colour values per pixel, and the colour values are written to adjacent coordinate positions of the input texture.