Color prediction modeling for five-channel CMYLcLm printing

In printing, halftoning algorithms are applied in order to reproduce a continuous-tone image by a binary printing system. The image is transformed into a bitmap composed of dots varying in size and/or frequency. Nevertheless, this causes that the sparse dots found in light shades of cyan (C) and magenta (M) appear undesirably noticeable against white substrate. The solution is to apply light cyan (Lc) and light magenta (Lm) inks in those regions. In order to predict the color of CMYLcLm prints, we make use of the fact that Lc and Lm have similar spectral characteristics as C and M respectively. The goal of this paper is to present a model to characterize a five-channel CMYLcLm printing system using a threechannel color prediction model, where we treat the ink combinations Lc+C and Lm+M as new compound inks. This characterization is based on our previous three-channel CMY color prediction model that is capable of predicting both colorimetric tri-stimulus values and spectral reflectance. The drawback of the proposed model in this paper is the requirement of large number of training samples. Strategies are proposed to reduce this number, which resulted in expected larger but acceptable color differences.