Innovative method for spectral-based printer characterization

The paper presents an innovative approach to the spectral-based characterization of ink-jet color printers. Our objective was to design a color separation procedure based on a spectral model of the printer, managed here as an RGB device. The printer was a four-ink device, and we assumed that the driver always replaced the black completely when converting from RGB to CMYK amounts of ink. The color separation procedure, which estimates the RGB values given a reflectance spectrum, is based on the inversion of the Yule-Nielsen modified Neugebauer model. To improve the performance of the direct Neugebauer model in computing the reflectance spectrum of the print, given the amounts of ink, we designed a method that exploits the results of the numerical inversion of the Neugebauer model to estimate a correction of the amount of black ink computed on RGB values. This correction can be considered a first step in optimization of the Neugebauer model; it accounts for ink-trapping and the lack of knowledge on how the black is actually replaced by the printer driver