Softcopy banding visibility assessment

Osman Arslan; Zygmunt Pizlo; Jan P. Allebach

doi:10.1117/12.593684

17 January 2005 Softcopy banding visibility assessment

Osman Arslan, Zygmunt Pizlo, Jan P. Allebach

Proceedings Volume 5668, Image Quality and System Performance II; (2005) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.593684
Event: Electronic Imaging 2005, 2005, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

Banding is a printer artifact perceived as one dimensional luminance variations across the print-out caused by the vibrations of different printer components. In the printing industry, banding is considered to be one of the worst defects that dominates overall perceived image quality. Understanding the visibility of banding will help us in developing strategies to reduce the banding artifact. We developed a softcopy environment to conduct various experiments for investigating the visibility of banding. This environment includes the methodology to duplicate the print on the monitor, and a banding extraction technique. This technique enables us to freely adjust the magnitude of banding of any printer. We validated the accuracy of this methodology by conducting a banding matching experiment. We used this platform to conduct banding visibility assessment experiments. One of them was a banding discrimination experiment. The results showed that for the printers investigated, a reduction of 6.5% in the banding magnitude will be just noticeable by an average observer. We were also able to find the detection thresholds of banding in grayscale images for three laser electrophotographic printers. The detection threshold of the best printer was about 50% of its original banding. So there is still plenty of room to reduce the visibility of the banding artifact. We were also able to compare the banding visibility of different printers quantitatively by conducting a cross-platform experiment. This methodology can form the basis for a metric for visibility of banding.

Citation Download Citation

Osman Arslan, Zygmunt Pizlo, and Jan P. Allebach "Softcopy banding visibility assessment", Proc. SPIE 5668, Image Quality and System Performance II, (17 January 2005); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.593684

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