Flatbed scanners have been adopted successfully in the measurement of microscopic image artifacts, such as granularity and mottle, in print samples because of their capability of providing full color, high resolution images. Accurate macroscopic color measurement relies on the use of colorimeters or spectrophotometers to provide a surrogate for human vision. The very different color response characteristics of flatbed scanners from any standard colorimetric response limits the utility of a flatbed scanner as a macroscopic color measuring device. This metamerism constraint can be significantly relaxed if our objective is mainly to quantify the color variations within a printed page or between pages where a small bias in measured colors can be tolerated as long as the color distributions relative to the individual mean values is similar. Two scenarios when converting color from the device RGB color space to a standardized color space such as CIELab are studied in this paper, blind and semi-blind color transformation, depending on the availability of the black channel information. We will show that both approaches offer satisfactory results in quantifying macroscopic color variation across pages while the semi-blind color transformation further provides fairly accurate color prediction capability.

Date Published: 17 January 2006
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6059, Image Quality and System Performance III, 60590G (17 January 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.641757

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6059:
Image Quality and System Performance III
Luke C. Cui; Yoichi Miyake, Editor(s)