Active digital press optimization

Abstract

While the traditional printing industry has been experiencing significant challenges from the rapid advancement of telecommunication and display technologies, the increasing demand for short-run and high quality printed material, fulfilled by digital printing technologies, provides future growth opportunity. To minimize the production cost in material and labor, researchers continue to pursue the idea of a Smart Printing Press, which can predict and sense possible failures and automatically recover to optimize the output image quality. In this paper, we will introduce a press-optimization algorithm to deterministically detect and automatically repair the non-uniformity image artifact through modulating the exposure output from its digital image-writing modules. This algorithm has been successfully deployed in the Intelligent Calibration System software package on commercial digital presses of Eastman Kodak Company.