Closed-loop color calibration for the home user

The proliferation of cheap color peripherals such as printers, scanners and digital cameras, has rendered them accessible to home users who can connect them to capture color images, and print these out on a color hard-copy device such as an ink-jet printer. Color consistency between the scanned original and the printed image is a well-known problem that has been approached by various techniques. Industry standards for color-management systems attempt to provide a device-independent framework for the consistent transfer of color images between devices in a manner that is transparent to the user. These systems require the specification of device characteristics that are often unavailable for older and/or inexpensive peripherals. In this paper, a closed-loop color-matching system to achieve consistent color reproduction between an original color image and a printed copy of the scanned original, is presented. The technique is designed for home users of scanners and printers who may not have access to expensive equipment for conducting photometric measurements. The algorithm requires minimal user intervention and is computationally efficient. To perform a calibration run, a small set of reference color patches printed by the printer are scanned using the scanner. A computer program analyzes the correspondence between the printed and scanned values to generate the necessary mappings.