Mottling is one of the most important printing defects in modern offset printing using coated papers. Mottling can be defined as undesired unevenness in perceived print density. In our research, we have implemented three methods to evaluate print mottle: the standard method, the cluster-based method, and the bandpass method. Our goal was to study the methods presented in literature, and modify them by taking relevant characteristics of the human visual system into account. For comparisons, we used a test set of 20 grey mottle samples which were assessed by both humans and the modified methods. The results show that when assessing low-contrast unevenness of print, humans have diverse opinions about quality, and none of the methods accurately capture the characteristics of human vision.

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Mottling is one of the most significant defects in modern offset printing using coated papers. Mottling can be defined as undesired unevenness in perceived print density. Previous research in the field considered only gray scale prints. In our work, we extend current methodology to color prints. Our goal was to study the characteristics of the human visual system, perform psychometric experiments and develop methods which can be used at industrial level applications. We developed a method for color prints and extensively tested it with a number of experts and laymen. Suggested approach based on pattern-color perception separability proved to correlate with the human evaluation well.

Mottling is one of the most severe printing defects in modern offset printing using coated papers. It can be defined as undesired unevenness in perceived print density. In our studies, we have implemented two methods known from the literature to quantify print mottle: the standard method for prints from office equipment and the bandpass method specially designed for mottling. Our goal was to study the performance of the methods when compared to human perception. For comparisons, we used a test set of 20 grey samples which were assessed by professional and non-professional people, and the artificial methods. The results show that the bandpass method can be used to quantify mottling of grey samples with a reasonable accuracy. However, we propose a modification to the bandpass method. The enhanced bandpass method utilizes a contrast sensitivity function for the human visual system directly in the frequency domain and the function parameters are optimized based on the human assessment. This results a significant improvement in the correlation to human assessment when compared to the original bandpass method.

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