Improving Tone Prediction in Calibration of Electrophotographic Printers by Linear Regression: Environmental, Consumables and Tone-Level Factors

Abstract

Environmental and consumable operating conditions have been observed to have significant impact on the color electrophotographic (EP) process. This article presents the results of utilizing operating information to improve the sensor mapping which predicts tone reproduction on printing media based on measurements on substitute media in the calibration. In this article, time-series sensor data and color measurements have been collected from off-the-shelf color EP platform printers under a variety of operating conditions. The data analysis shows that the sensor mapping has distinctive behaviors under different levels of relative humidity and cartridge toner consumption. In addition, the sensor mapping has been found to be sensitive to tone level. A new prediction model is proposed to compensate for environmental, consumable and tone-level disturbances. The experimental results show the proposed model is able to improve the prediction accuracy by 30% on average across the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK) primary colors. .