Design and development of a set of colour image systems for graphic arts production: Dissertation

A set of novel colour image systems has been designed and developed for improving the throughput and colour quality of the graphic arts production. The six systems are based on a common computer architecture, but they carry out different tasks in the computerized production process of printed products. They administrate in new ways visual colour information - including video - and communicate the information between the stages of printing production. Three of the systems are prototypes and three are applied in daily production. The first system is a multimedia prototype for the management and printing of video images. The management uses in a novel way free text retrieval combined with a visual user interface, to provide flexible tools for finding images. The system automatically proposes illustrations for items retrieved from a news text service. In addition, the system contains methods for converting colour video images into a printed form of acceptable quality. This prototype is the basis for the other systems in this thesis. The second system is an image archiving system, applying the same management principles as in the prototype but a more advanced user interface and more sophisticated image processing properties. In several installations, it has been found to speed up the image retrieval process significantly. In the third system, the video printing methods of the prototype are refined and applied in a production system that improves the colour quality of S-video printings. As shown by a pioneer user, the system enables a fast and low-cost production of low-end printing products in colour. The final three image systems are tools for the visual control of the page production flow. The fourth system shows in the prototype form how a repro house or department can send page proofs from an arbitrary reproduction and pagination equipment over the telephone network to the workstation of the client. The monitor-to-monitor teleproof saves time and money considerably, compared with the preparation and transportation of physical proofs. The fifth system manages in a new way newspaper pages, that are received either from the pagination data or from the printing plate scanner. In practical production the system has been found to be a valuable tool to avoid colour errors and to give an overview of the production situation. The sixth system inspects on-line the colour quality of the print selectively, by analysing the digital page description in advance. This new concept of integrating prepress information with printing control, in combination with an on-line machine vision, is shown to enable colour measurements that are exact enough to form a basis for the feed-back control of the printing colour quality.