N-Ink Printer Characterization with Barycentric Subdivision

V. Babaei, R. D. Hersch

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 25(7): pp 3023-3031, 2016

Printing with a large number of inks, also called N-ink printing, is a challenging task. The challenges comprise spectral modelling of the printer, color separation, halftoning, and limitations of the amount of inks. Juxtaposed halftoning, a perfectly dot-off-dot halftoning method, has proven to be useful to address some of these challenges. However, for juxtaposed halftones, prediction of colors as a function of ink area-coverages has not yet been fully investigated. The goal of this paper is to introduce a spectral prediction model for N-ink juxtaposed-halftone prints. As the area-coverage domain of juxtaposed inks forms a simplex, we propose a cellular subdivision of the area-coverage domain using barycentric subdivision of simplexes. The barycentric subdivision provides algorithmically straightforward means to design and implement an N-ink color prediction model. Within the subdomain cells, the Yule-Nielsen spectral Neugebauer model is used for the spectral prediction. Our proposed model is highly accurate for prints with a large number of inks while requiring a relatively low number of calibration samples.

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