Hitoshi Ogatsu

Flexible gray component replacement (GCR) based on CIE L*a*b*

To improve the color fidelity of 4 color reproduction and to increase the flexibility of Gray Component Replacement (GCR) for the text and continuous images, a novel GCR algorithm based on CIE L*a*b* signals is proposed. The algorithm consist of (1) maximum (achromatic) black determination part, (2) black adjustment part based on chroma, and (3) 3 color determination part. On this configuration, black signal is determined ahead of MCY signals, and the freedom of 3 input i.e L*a*b* 4 output i.e. CMYBk conversion is concentrated in (2). By using xerographic color printer, by neural network technique for resolving this, the algorithm is examined. As a result, it is shown that the algorithm can conserve the color fidelity in any GCR rate, and which is applicable on both of text and continuous images.