Halftone independent methods for color drift correction

Color printer calibration is the process of deriving correction functions for device CMYK signals, so that the device can be maintained with a fixed known characteristic color response. Since the colorimetric response of the printer can be a strong function of the halftone, the calibration process must be repeated for every halftone supported by the printer. The effort involved in the calibration process thus increases linearly with the number of halftoning methods. In the past few years, it has become common for high-end digital color printers to be equipped with a large number of halftones thus making the calibration process onerous. We propose a halftone independent method for correcting color (CMY/CMYK) printer drift. Our corrections are derived by measuring a small number of halftone independent fundamental binary patterns based on the 2×2 binary printer model by Wang et. al. Hence, the required measurements do not increase as more halftoning methods are added. The key novelty in our work is in identifying an invariant halftone correction factor (HCF) that exploits the knowledge of the relationship between the true printer response and the 2×2 predicted response for a given halftoning scheme. We evaluate our scheme both quantitatively and qualitatively against the printer color correction transform derived with the printer in its "default state". Results indicate that the proposed method is very successful in calibrating a printer across a wide variety of halftones.