Impact of reproduction size and halftoning method on print quality perception

Abstract

© 2016, Budapest Tech Polytechnical Institution. All rights reserved. This paper presents a study related to image reproduction quality assessment. The experiment was designed to determine the impact of halftone image dimensions on the perception of image fidelity and grain structure, these two, being important quality attributes. Subjective quality assessment experiments were designed to complement recently published findings obtained by objective image metric methods for quality assessment. Image fidelity and grain structure are understandable to the observers that are not familiar with the methods used to determine image quality. These attributes are directly dependent on the chosen halftoning method. In this research, the samples were halftoned using two different types of screening methods: frequency modulation (FM) and amplitude modulation (AM) method. The experiment produced around 4000 data samples, which were analyzed by standard statistical methods. Results indicate a significant influence of the image size and halftoning method on the subjective quality assessment.