EP printer jitter characterization using 2D Gabor filter and spectral analysis

Electrophotographic (EP) printer banding and jitter defects are main sources of print quality degradation. Traditionally, the characterization of these defects relies mainly on the assumption that the defect has either horizontal or vertical orientation to permit the simple ID analysis of the defect profile. However, this assumption can easily be violated if a small amount of printer or scanner skew is introduced to the analyzed images. In some cases the defect can inherently be neither vertical nor horizontal. Unless the defect orientation has been accurately detected before analysis, the ID-based approaches could bias the estimation of the defect severity. In this paper, we present an approach to characterize the skewed jitter defects of unrestricted orientation using 2D-based analysis of Gabor pre-filtering and spectral analysis. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach provides an objective measure that quantifies the EP jitter defect, and correlates to the subjective assessment of print quality experts with a 0.96 correlation coefficient.