Personalization is not a common practice in packaging industry. In publishing industry, personalization is highly valued and business is rapidly growing. We have worked extensively on leveraging state-of-the-art of personalization for packaging. As packaging industry deploys digital technologies, we believe personalization will yield high value packages. However the state-of-the-art techniques of publishing workflow inadequately address the issues and complexities of packaging workflow. The packaging prototyping industry uses highly labor intensive ad-hoc methods that are difficult scale up to profitable production of packages. While this problem in general is very hard, we have developed an initial scalable solution for 3D pop-up greeting cards, whose workflow is very similar to production of personalized folding cartons, point of purchase display, or a structure with cutouts. In our method we auto generate a plotter/cutter cut-path from an image asset that pops-out against a background. The system uses the image asset, the generated path, a variable background image, and a selected base structure template, to generate a combined raster image of the template for printing. It also generates a vector image that contains both the generated path and the cutting and creasing instructions of the base template. This vector image enables us to drive a programmable plotter/cutter to extract a personalized structural piece. To enable scalable production, we automatically coordinate the printing of the composed graphics and the extraction of the 'graphics specific' cut, creased and perforated structure without human intervention. Such a system enables rapid production of personalized dimensional mail piece flats, POP displays and simple folding cartons.
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