Research on Print Defect Visibility and Evaluation

Jing, Xiaochen Ph.D., Purdue University, December 2013. Research on Print Defect Visibility and Evaluation . Major Professor: Jan P. Allebach. Banding is a well-known artifact produced by printing systems. It usually appears as lines perpendicular to the process direction of the print. Therefore, banding is an important print quality issue which has been analyzed and assessed by many researchers. However, little literature has focused on the study of the masking effect of content for this kind of print quality issue. Compared with other image and print quality research, our work is focused on the print quality of typical documents printed on a digital commercial printing press. In this paper, we propose a Masking Mediated Print Defect Visibility Predictor (MMPDVP) to predict the visibility of defects in the presence of customer content. The parameters of the algorithm are trained from ground-truth images that have been marked by subjects. The MMPDVP could help the press operator decide whether the print quality is acceptable for specific customer requirements. Ultimately, this model can be used to optimize the print-shop workflow. Laser Electro-Photographic (EP) printers are complex systems that can generate prints with a number of possible artifacts that are very different in nature. It is a challenging task to develop a single processing algorithm that can effectively identify such a wide range of print quality defects. In this paper, we describe an image processing and analysis pipeline that can effectively assess the presence of a wide range of artifacts, as a general approach. In our paper, we will discuss in detail the algorithm that comprises the image processing and analysis pipeline, and will illustrate the efficacy of the pipeline with a number of examples.