Misalignment between the color planes used to print color images creates undesirable artifacts in printed images.
Color trapping is a technique used to diminish these artifacts. It consists of creating small overlaps between
the color planes, either at the page description language level or the rasterized image level. Existing color
trapping algorithms for rasterized images trap pixels independently. Once a pixel is trapped, the next pixel is
processed without making use of the information already acquired. We propose a more efficient strategy which
makes use of this information. Our strategy is based on the observation of some important properties of color
edges. Combined with any existing algorithm for trapping rasterized images, this strategy significantly reduces
its complexity. We implement this strategy in combination with a previously proposed color trapping algorithm
(WBTA08). Our numerical tests indicate an average reduction of close to 38% in the combined number of
multiplications, additions, and "if" statements required to trap a page, as compared with WBTA08 by itself.
CMYK color separation is a technique commonly used in printing to reproduce mutli-color images. However,
the color planes are generally not perfectly aligned with respect to each other when they are rendered by the
imaging stations. This phenomenon, called color plane mis-registration, causes gap and halo artifacts. Trapping
algorithms aim to reduce these artifacts by scanning through an image, determining the edges susceptible to
mis-registration errors, and moving the edge boundaries of the lighter colorants underneath the edge boundaries
of the darker colorants. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity approach to automatic color trapping which
hides the effects of small color plane mis-registrations without negatively affecting the overall quality of the
printed image.
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