Ahmed H. Eid

Photoconductor surface modeling for defect compensation based on printed images

Manufacturing imperfections of photoconductor (PC) drums in electrophotographic (EP) printers cause low- frequency artifacts that could produce objectionable non-uniformities in the final printouts. In this paper, we propose a technique to detect and quantify PC artifacts. Furthermore, we spatially model the PC drum surface for dynamic compensation of drum artifacts. After scanning printed pages of flat field areas, we apply a wavelet- based filtering technique to the scanned images to isolate the PC-related artifacts from other printing artifacts, based on the frequency, range, and direction of the PC defects. Prior knowledge of the PC circumference determines the printed area at each revolution of the drum for separate analysis. Applied to the filtered images, the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm models the PC defects as a mixture of Gaussians. We use the estimated parameters of the Gaussians to measure the severity of the defect. In addition, a 2-D polynomial fitting approach characterizes the spatial artifacts of the drum, by analyzing multiple revolutions of printed output. The experimental results show a high correlation of the modeled artifacts from different revolutions of a drum. This allows for generating a defect-compensating profile of the defective drum.

Automated measurement of printer effective addressability

When evaluating printer resolution, addressability is a key consideration. Addressability defines the maximum number of spots or samples within a given distance, independent of the size of the spots when printed. Effective addressability is the addressability demonstrated by the final, printed output. It is the minimum displacement possible between the centers of printed objects. In this paper, we present a measurement procedure for effective addressability that offers an automated way to experimentally determine the addressability of the printed output. It requires printing, scanning, and measuring a test target. The effective addressability test target contains two types of elements, repeated to fill the page: fiducial lines and line segments. The fiducial lines serve as a relative reference for the incremental displacements of the individual line segments, providing a way to tolerate larger-scale physical distortions in the printer. An ordinary reflection scanner captures the printed test target. By rotating the page on the scanner, it is possible to measure effective addressability well beyond the scanner’s sampling resolution. The measurement algorithm computes the distribution of incremental displacements, forming either a unimodal or bimodal histogram. In the latter case, the mean of the second (non-zero) peak indicates the effective addressability. In the former case, the printer successfully rendered the target’s resolution, requiring another iteration of the procedure after increasing the resolution of the test target. The algorithm automatically estimates whether the histogram is unimodal or bimodal and computes parameters describing the quality of the measured histogram. Several experiments have refined the test target and measurement procedure, including two round-robin evaluations by the ISO WG4 committee. Results include an analysis of approximately 150 printed samples. The effective addressability attribute and measurement procedure are included in ISO/IEC TS 29112, a technical specification that describes the objective measurement of printer resolution for monochrome electrophotographic printers.

On the analysis of wavelet-based approaches for print mottle artifacts

Print mottle is one of several attributes described in ISO/IEC DTS 24790, a draft technical specification for the measurement of image quality for monochrome printed output. It defines mottle as aperiodic fluctuations of lightness less than about 0.4 cycles per millimeter, a definition inherited from the latest official standard on printed image quality, ISO/IEC 13660. In a previous publication, we introduced a modification to the ISO/IEC 13660 mottle measurement algorithm that includes a band-pass, wavelet-based, filtering step to limit the contribution of high-frequency fluctuations including those introduced by print grain artifacts. This modification has improved the algorithm’s correlation with the subjective evaluation of experts who rated the severity of printed mottle artifacts. Seeking to improve upon the mottle algorithm in ISO/IEC 13660, the ISO 24790 committee evaluated several mottle metrics. This led to the selection of the above wavelet-based approach as the top candidate algorithm for inclusion in a future ISO/IEC standard. Recent experimental results from the ISO committee showed higher correlation between the wavelet-based approach and the subjective evaluation conducted by the ISO committee members based upon 25 samples covering a variety of printed mottle artifacts. In addition, we introduce an alternative approach for measuring mottle defects based on spatial frequency analysis of wavelet- filtered images. Our goal is to establish a link between the spatial-based mottle (ISO/IEC DTS 24790) approach and its equivalent frequency-based one in light of Parseval’s theorem. Our experimental results showed a high correlation between the spatial and frequency based approaches.

A linear filter design technique for equalizing document scanners

In this paper, we propose a new technique to automatically restore the sharpness of blurred documents by equalizing the frequency response of given scanners using linear filters. To measure the blur characteristics of a scanning device, we measure its both horizontal and vertical Spatial Frequency Response (SFR). Starting from the measured SFR of the scanning device, we design an equalizing filter so that the combined SFR of the equalizing filter and the scanner resembles a perfect SFR. The desired 2D frequency response of the filter is computed using linear interpolation of the horizontal and vertical responses derived from the corresponding SFRs of the scanner. The filter design technique is two steps. First, a linear system of equations is constructed using the unknown filter coefficients and the desired filter 2D frequency response. The linear least squares method is used to solve the linear system of equations. The second step of the filter design uses a nonlinear optimization technique to refine the results of the first step. Our experimental results show that this automated process can be applied to different document scanning devices to equalize their spatial frequency response resulting in consistent output sharpness levels.

Descreening using segmentation-based adaptive filtering

Ordered halftone patterns in the original document interact with the periodic sampling of the scanner, producing objectionable moir´e patterns. These are exacerbated when the copy is reprinted with an ordered halftone pattern. A simple, small low-pass filter can be used to descreen the image and to correct the majority of moir´e artifacts. Unfortunately, low-pass filtering affects detail as well, blurring it even further. Adaptive nonlinear filtering based on image features such as the magnitude and the direction of image gradient can also be used. However, non careful tuning of such filters could either cause damage to small details while descreeing the halftone areas, or result in less descreening while sharpening small details. In this paper, we present a new segmentation-based descreening technique. Scanned images are segmented into text, images and halftone classes using a multiresolution classification of edge features. The segmentation results guide a nonlinear, adaptive filter to favor sharpening or blurring of image pixels belonging to different classes. Our experimental results show the ability of the non-linear, segmentation driven filter of successfully descreening halftone areas while sharpening small size text contents.