Psychophysical Evaluation of Banding Visibility in the Presence of Print Content

摘要

Observing and evaluating print defects represents a major challenge in the area of print quality research. Visual identification and quantification of these print defects becomes a key issue for improving print quality. However, the page content may confound the visual evaluation of print defects in actual printouts. Our research is focused on banding in the presence of print content in the context of commercial printing. In this paper, a psychophysical experiment is described to evaluate the perception of bands in the presence of print content. A number of banding defects are added by way of simulation to a selected set of commercial print contents to form our set of stimuli. The participants in the experiment mark these stimuli based on their observations via a graphical user interface (GUI). Based on the collection of the marked stimuli, we were able to see general consistency among different participants. Moreover, the results showed that the likelihood of an observer perceiving the banding defect in a smooth area is much higher than in a high frequency area. Furthermore, our results also indicate that the luminance of the image may locally affect the visibility of the print defects to some degree.