Ink-jet print attributes such as color gamut, grain, and cost are consequences of the materials and printing technology used and of choices made during color management, color separation, and halftoning operation. Traditionally, color separation determines what amounts of the available inks to use for each reproducible color, and halftoning deals with the spatial distribution of inks that also results in the nature of their overprinting. However, using an ink space as a means of communication between color separation and halftoning gives access only to some of the printed patterns that a printing system is capable of and, therefore, only to a reduced range of print attributes. Here, a method, i.e., Halftone Area Neugebauer Separation, is proposed to gain access to all possible printable patterns by specifying relative area coverages of a printing system's Neugebauer primaries instead of only ink amounts. This results in delivering prints with more optimal attributes (e.g., using less ink and giving rise to a larger color gamut) than is possible using current methods.

Printer color characterization, e.g., in the form of an ICC output profile or other proprietary mechanism linking printer RGB/CMYK inputs to resulting colorimetry, is fundamental to a printing system delivering output that is acceptable to its recipients. Due to the inherently nonlinear and complex relationship between a printing system's inputs and the resulting color output, color characterization typically requires a large sample of printer inputs (e.g., RGB/CMYK) and corresponding color measurements of printed output. Simple sampling techniques here lead to inefficiency and a low return for increases in sampling density. While effective solutions have been proposed to this problem very recently, they either do not exploit the full possibilities of the 3-D/4-D space being sampled or they make assumptions about the underlying relationship being sampled . The approach presented here does not make assumptions beyond those inherent in the subsequent tessellation and interpolation applied to the resulting samples. Instead, the tradeoff here is the great computational cost of the initial optimization, which, however, only needs to be performed during the printing system's engineering and is transparent to its end users. Results show a significant reduction in the number of samples needed to match a given level of color accuracy.

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Digital capture (scanning in all its forms, and digital photography/video recording), in providing virtually free temporary memory of captured information, allows users to "overgather" information during capture, and then to discard unwanted material later. For cameras and video recorders, such editing largely consists of discarding images or frames in their entirety. For scanners (and high-resolution camera/video), such editing benefits from a preview capability that provides quick and reliable user-interface tools for selecting, filtering and saving specific portions of the input. Appropriate preview user interface (UI) tools ease the accessing, editing and dispatch to desired destination (archive, application, webpage, etc.) of captured information (text, tables, drawings, photos, etc.). In this paper, we present several different means for the user-directed "rapid capture" of portions of a scanned image. Specifically, we review past, present and future preview-based UI tools that allow efficient and accurate means of capture to the user. The bases of these tools, as described herein, are user-directed zoning analysis, known as "click and select", which incorporates a bottom-up zoning analysis engine; and statistics-based region classification, which allows rapid reconfiguration of region identification and clustering. We conclude with our view of the future of UIdirected capture.

Abstract. When a user places a document in a capture device-copier, multifunctional printer [MFP], or scanner-the user expects good output to be produced regardless of the document type. There are a variety of means to achieve improved output, in which the settings on the copying device are tuned to the content characteristics of the document. These settings can be automated across the range of scanned context extremes from photo (blurring, no snapping) to fully-text (sharpening, aggressive snapping) documents. This procedure is "document auto typing", and relies on a fast and accurate assessment of the content of the captured image. We herein describe the development of seven distinct systems for document analysis, and through the comparison of these systems arrive at an efficient and accurate document analysis system for automating the copying settings. We discuss the applicability of this method to other automated workflows in document capture.