Subjective and objective evaluation of color fidelity for printing light sources

Based on the clustering optimization of test color samples and a psychophysical experiment, the objective and subjective color fidelity of light sources for printing matter is evaluated, and an improved evaluation method thus has been proposed. Firstly, for representing the output characteristics of printing press, the International Color Consortium standard color target samples (ICC SCTS), which is measured in the process of color management, is used as a large color sample set. In a 6D spectral color space proposed in this paper, the optimized color sample set (OCSS) is obtained by Self Organizing Maps Neural Networks (SOMNN) clustering algorithm from ICC SCTS. Taking OCSS, ICC SCTS, and standard color sample set (SCSS) as the test color sample set, three objective color fidelity indexes (CFIs) CIE-Ra, Ra,2012, and CIE-Rf of 1202 light sources are calculated. The correlation metrics of the CFIs show that the OCSS highly improved the objective accuracy of color fidelity evaluation for printing matters. Secondly, in the psychophysical experiment, 20 observers have evaluated the visual color difference of the OCSS under the illumination of nine pairs of test and reference light sources. The subjective CFIs are calculated by using the visual color difference of OCSS obtained from the psychophysical experiment. In order to improve the subjective and objective consistency of CFIs, a polynomial modified model for objective color difference of OCSS is proposed. By the optimization of test color samples and the modification of color difference calculation, the method developed in this paper can be effectively and conveniently applied to the subjective and objective evaluation of light source for printing matters.