Deducing Ink Spreading Curves from Reflection Spectra Acquired Within Printed Color Images

The Yule–Nielsen modified spectral Neugebauer model (YNSN) enhanced for accounting for ink spreading in the different ink superposition conditions provides accurate spectral predictions, but requires one to measure the reflectances of special halftone calibration patches in order to compute the ink spreading curves mapping nominal ink surface coverage to effective ink surface coverage. Printing special halftone calibration patches within the borders of the print pages is cumbersome, since these special patches need to be cut out before assembling the final printed product. In the present contribution, we calibrate the ink spreading curves directly from the printed images by fitting them so as to minimize a distance metric between predicted reflectances and measured reflectances at selected relatively uniform locations. We compare the prediction accuracy of the so-calibrated YNSN model with the prediction accuracy of the same model calibrated by the spectral reflectances of classical uniform calibration patches. Interestingly, when the model is calibrated from image tiles originating from the same or from a similar color image as the one comprising the test tiles, better prediction results are obtained than when performing a classical calibration on 50% halftone patches printed in all superposition conditions.