Sketch for Eco-friendly Printing

Reducing toner or ink consumption is an important function of modern printing devices. It has a positive ecological and economic impact. We describe a technique for converting bitmaps from print-jobs to pleasant colour sketches. Such sketches contain significantly fewer colour dots than the initial images. The approach serves to reduce toner consumption. Our algorithm is based on the use of an edge-detection filter for mask creation and multiplication of the initial image by the mask. In order to construct the mask, we use a Difference-of-Gaussian filter for the purpose of blending the initial image with its blurred copy, where the alpha-channel is a saliency map according to the Pre-attentive Human Vision model. An estimation of the percentage of saved toner as well as a survey of observers proves the effectiveness of the proposed technique for saving toner in eco-friendly printing mode.