Assessment of presence of isolated periodic and aperiodic bands in laser electrophotographic printer output

Laser electrophotographic printers are complex systems with many rotating components that are used to advance the media, and facilitate the charging, exposure, development, transfer, fusing, and cleaning steps. Irregularities that are constant along the axial direction of a roller or drum, but which are localized in circumference can give rise to distinct isolated bands in the output print that are constant in the scan direction, and which may or may not be observed to repeat at an interval in the process direction that corresponds to the circumference of the roller or drum that is responsible for the artifact. In this paper, we describe an image processing and analysis pipeline that can effectively assess the presence of isolated periodic and aperiodic bands in the output from laser electrophotographic printers. In our paper, we will discuss in detail the algorithms that comprise the image processing and analysis pipeline, and will illustrate the efficacy of the pipeline with an example.

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