Multichannel printer modeling has been an active area of research in the field of spectral printing. The most commonly used models for characterization of such systems are the spectral Neugebauer (SN) and its extensions. This work addresses issues that can arise during calibration and testing of the SN model when modelling a 7-colorant printer. Since most substrates are limited in their capacity to take in large amount of ink, it is not always possible to print all colorant combinations necessary to determine the Neugebauer primaries (NP). A common solution is to estimate the nonprintable Neugebauer primaries from the single colorant primaries using the Kubelka-Munk (KM) optical model. In this work we test whether a better estimate can be obtained using general radiative transfer theory, which better represents the angular variation of the reflectance from highly absorbing media, and takes surface scattering into account. For this purpose we use the DORT2002 model. We conclude DORT2002 does not offer significant improvements over KM in the estimation of the NPs, but a significant improvement is obtained when using a simple surface scattering model. When the estimated primaries are used as inputs to the SN model instead of measured ones, it is found the SN model performs the same or better in terms of color difference and spectral error. If the mixed measured and estimated primaries are used as inputs to the SN model, it performs better than using either measured or estimated.

Date Published: 24 February 2014
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9018, Measuring, Modeling, and Reproducing Material Appearance, 90180C (24 February 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2044041

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9018:
Measuring, Modeling, and Reproducing Material Appearance
Maria V. Ortiz Segovia; Philipp Urban; Jan P. Allebach, Editor(s)