Modeling and Simulation of a JBIG2 Compliant Color Printer Pipeline

We develop a computer aided design (CAD) tool for the simulation and testing of a color image printing pipeline. True color images typically have three color planes (red, green and blue) with eight bits of resolution per pixel per image plane. Printing these images involves a binarization process called halftoning which converts each color plane into a binary image for rendering on binary devices such as printers. While the halftoning algorithm is the heart of the printer pipeline, several preprocessing methods are often required to perform basic image manipulations. These include printer dependent color transformations, image scaling/resizing, and image compression. Thus images at various stages in the printer pipeline are subjected to various types of distortions. Simulation of the printer pipeline is of key importance for end-to-end performance optimization. We model the printer pipeline using the synchronous data ow (SDF) model of computation in the Ptolemy design environment. We simulate typical tradeo s in a color printer pipeline using JBIG2 compliant image compression. We also provide an interactive high level interface to key pipeline parameters via MATLAB and/or the Ptolemy graphical user interface (GUI).