The Lattice-Based Screen Set: A Square N -Color All-Orders Moiré-Free Screen Set.

Periodic clustered-dot screens are widely used for electrophotographic printers due to their print stability. However, moiré is a ubiquitous problem that arises in color printing due to the beating together of the clustered-dot, periodic halftone patterns that are used to represent different colorants. The traditional solution in the graphic arts and printing industry is to rotate identical square screens to angles that are maximally separated from each other. However, the effectiveness of this approach is limited when printing with more than four colorants, i.e., N -color printing, where N > 4 . Moreover, accurately achieving the angles that have maximum angular separation requires a very high-resolution plate writer, as is used in commercial offset printing. Commercially available high-end digital printers cannot achieve this resolution. In this paper, we propose a systematic way to design color screen sets for periodic, clustered-dot screens that offer more explicit control of the moiré properties of the resulting screens when used in color printing. We develop a principled approach for the moiré-free screen design that is called lattice-based screen design. The basic concept behind our approach is the creation of the screen set on a 2D lattice in the frequency domain, and then picking each fundamental frequency vector of the individual colorant planes in the created spectral lattice according to the desired properties. The lattice-based screen design offers more flexibility in designing N -color screen sets with different halftone geometries, and all of them are guaranteed to be all-orders moiré-free. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method by introducing several new screen designs, and a comparison with published screen designs.

Space-dependent color gamut mapping: a variational approach.

Gamut mapping deals with the need to adjust a color image to fit into the constrained color gamut of a given rendering medium. A typical use for this tool is the reproduction of a color image prior to its printing, such that it exploits best the given printer/medium color gamut, namely the colors the printer can produce on the given medium. Most of the classical gamut mapping methods involve a pixel-by-pixel mapping and ignore the spatial color configuration. Recently proposed spatial-dependent approaches for gamut mapping are either based on heuristic assumptions or involve a high computational cost. In this paper, we present a new variational approach for space-dependent gamut mapping. Our treatment starts with the presentation of a new measure for the problem, closely related to a recent measure proposed for Retinex. We also link our method to recent measures that attempt to couple spectral and spatial perceptual measures. It is shown that the gamut mapping problem leads to a quadratic programming formulation, guaranteed to have a unique solution if the gamut of the target device is convex. An efficient numerical solution is proposed with promising results.

Measuring the quality of quality measures.

Print quality (PQ) is a composite attribute defined by human perception. As such, the ultimate way to determine and quantify PQ is by human survey. However, repeated surveys are time consuming and often represent a burden on processes that involve repeated evaluations. A desired alternative would be an automatic quality rating tool. Once such quality evaluation measure is proposed, it should be qualified. That is, it should be shown to reflect human assessment. If two of the human opinions conflict, the tool cannot possibly agree with both. Conflicts between human opinions are common, which complicates the evaluation of tool's success in reflecting human judgment. There are many optional ways for measuring the agreement between human assessment and tool evaluation, but different methods may have conflicting results. It is, therefore, important to pre-establish the appropriate method for the evaluation of quality-evaluation-tools, a method that takes the disagreement among the survey participants into account. In this paper, we model human quality preference and derive the most appropriate method to qualify quality evaluation tools. We demonstrate the resulting qualification method in a real life scenario-the qualification of the mechanical band meter.