An efficient low-complexity approach to color trapping

CMYK color separation is a technique commonly used in printing to reproduce mutli-color images. However, the color planes are generally not perfectly aligned with respect to each other when they are rendered by the imaging stations. This phenomenon, called color plane mis-registration, causes gap and halo artifacts. Trapping algorithms aim to reduce these artifacts by scanning through an image, determining the edges susceptible to mis-registration errors, and moving the edge boundaries of the lighter colorants underneath the edge boundaries of the darker colorants. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity approach to automatic color trapping which hides the effects of small color plane mis-registrations without negatively affecting the overall quality of the printed image.