Motivated by a recent halftoning method which is based on electrostatic principles, we analyze a halftoning framework where one minimizes a functional consisting of the difference of two convex functions. One describes attracting forces caused by the image's gray values; the other one enforces repulsion between points. In one dimension, the minimizers of our functional can be computed analytically and have the following desired properties: The points are pairwise distinct, lie within the image frame, and can be placed at grid points. In the two-dimensional setting, we prove some useful properties of our functional, such as its coercivity, and propose computing a minimizer by a forward-backward splitting algorithm. We suggest computing the special sums occurring in each iteration step of our dithering algorithm by a fast summation technique based on the fast Fourier transform at nonequispaced knots, which requires only $\mathcal{O}(m\log m)$ arithmetic operations for m points. Finally, we present numerical results showing the excellent performance of our dithering method.

Image restoration and simplification methods that respect important features such as edges play a fundamental role in digital image processing. However, known edge-preserving methods like common nonlinear diffusion methods tend to round vertices for large diffusion times. In this paper, we adapt the diffusion tensor for anisotropic diffusion to avoid this effects in images containing rotated and sheared rectangles, respectively. In this context, we propose a new method for estimating rotation angles and shear parameters based on the so-called structure tensor. Further, we show how the knowledge of appropriate diffusion tensors can be used in variational models. Numerical examples including orientation estimation, denoising and segmentation demonstrate the good performance of our methods.