Colour calibration for colour reproduction

Due to the proliferation of low-cost colour devices (digital colour cameras, scanners, printers etc.) during the last few years, colour calibration has become an important issue. Such devices should faithfully reproduce colour images, but experience shows they don’t. Among the main reasons, we note the diversity of acquisition, display and printing technologies which makes standardization difficult. Each device has a different gamut, i.e. a different set of colours that it can acquire or reproduce. Furthermore, the characteristics of the devices often vary with time. Hence a calibration procedure is unavoidable for high quality colour reproduction. We give a brief overview of the colour calibration standard proposed by the International Colour Consortium (ICC), and then we present new approaches based on colour prediction models. Instead of using a large number of colour samples which must be produced and measured, only a few characteristic parameters are measured. The data corresponding to all samples are computed by a colour prediction software. This allows a quick recalibration when, for instance, the paper or the ink cartridge of a printer is changed.