A comprehensive system for analyzing the presence of print quality defects

Abstract

Print quality (PQ) is most important in the printing industry. It plays a role in users’ satisfaction with their products. Page quality will be degraded when there are print quality defects on the printed page, which could be caused by the electrophotographic printer (EP) process and associated print mechanism. To identify the print quality issue, customers have to consult a printer user manual or contact customer service to describe the problems. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive system to analyze the printed page automatically and extract the important defect features to determine the type and severity of defects on the scanned page. This system incorporates many of our previous works. The input of this system is the master digital image and the scanned image of the printed page. The comprehensive system includes three modules: the region of interest (ROI) extraction module, the scanned image pre-processing module (image alignment and color calibration procedure), and the print defect analysis module (text fading detection, color fading detection, streak detection, and banding detection). This system analyzes the scanned images based on different ROIs, and each ROI will produce a printer defect feature vector. The final output is the whole feature vector including all the ROI feature vectors of the printed page, and this feature vector will be uploaded to customer service to analyze the printer defect.