Sahab Yazdani has written a windows program that can accomplish this, but can take a while for very dense images like your example. I've used it for a few projects, and it works very well.
http://www.saliences.com/projects/npr/stippling/stippling.html

Johannes Kopf et al. have shown another technique based on precomputed tiles that can fill a surface seamlessly. This is probably better suited to scriptographer, if you were to rewrite it.
http://johanneskopf.de/publications/blue_noise/

Sahab Yazdani's program may be exactly what I'm looking for. I'll have to give it a shot when I get to my Windows computer. Both are very interesting.

I've visited those sites just the other day, although about a whole different topic. The results are very nice and I would love to have a script like that!
Unfortunately (or is it?), I'm running OSX so I'm out of luck ob that one. However, there is a program called Vectoraster for making just that, rasters with vectors instead of bitmap. Vectoraster has the ability to make stochastic rasters with many different settings for one to play around with. It's Mac only and only cost a couple of dollars. Easily worth it and I think there is also a free tryout version as well. Check it out, regardless.
It can be found here:
http://www.lostminds.com/content/show_product.php?id=vectoraster4

that's a really neat tool. thanks for the link. Think I may buy it. this may be exactly what i am looking for.

I just took a glance at the Raster.js code and think you could modify the code to evaluate the darkness of the sample area and instead of making a coorelated size object (dot, square, whatever), you could have it select a random number between 1-5 and then make dots of that assorted size until the area of those accumalative dots coorelates to the darkness.

In otherwords, instead of going row by column and analyze the the darkness to create a large or small dot. Have the program create several dots of different size and location within the same sample area.

I'll play around with it this weekend and see if I can get it to do that. I have a need for that script as well.

Cheers.

interesting. let me know what you come up with.

Crap, wrote a long post and it all went to hell as I pressed the Create button.
Anyway, I've made some sort of Pseudo-Stochastic Raster Script that could, with some good will, imitate some inferior stipple effect. I don't think it holds up very well but you guys could read about it if you want, here.

arg, just lost my post too.

anyway, I'll make a write up for the original image I posted. maybe it could jog your imagination. I think part of the problem with the underwater sea monster is that it takes a very tight dot pattern to coherently reproduce all that detail. Faces and flowers are much more discernible and likely take significantly less detail to recognize.

Regardless, I agree with you conclusion. It will not be memory friendly and Vectoraster can do it all and then some. but it isn't available for PC.

I took a look at the process for that image and it's relatively simple. It may be worth noting that images like faces and flowers might work better simply because they are more recognizable.

The original image was about 220 pixels wide and the dot size was 3 pixels. The object raster settings were scale:100 and grid size 5. (The tight grid size might be key). The result was then ungrouped. with the objects still selected, 'object>transform each' was used with 300 percent for the horizontal and vertical scaling the individual dots were enlarged. (This step can probably be skipped if more appropriate scale and grid size values were used). Then 'object>transform each' was used again but with move settings at .07in for both the horizontal and vertical and 360 for the angle (no scaling) and the "random" check box clicked. This randomly moves the dots around so it doesn't look like a halftone grid.

and that was it. it doesn't seem like too many steps and although it is a lot of dots, my pc handled it pretty good.