A paper sheet P is fed to a transport mechanism, which conveys the sheet to a printer section, which prints a pattern on the sheet P. The image data on the printed sheet is supplied to an image input section, and compared with standard data at a print inspect section. The compared image data is sent to data display sections as the occasion demands and judged to be acceptable or unacceptable at judgment input sections. The judgment results are sent to a sort mechanism, which discards unacceptable printed matter P. This printing apparatus allows the judge to make a final judgment on printed matter containing minute defects or faint defects that the inspecting process cannot judge, and collects the judgment results, thereby being capable of printing while sorting only acceptable products accurately without lengthening the processing time.
In a sheet-like object identification method, a printing quality of each image of a sheet printed with a plurality of images is inspected. A sheet-like object in a printing state wherein all printed images are defective and a sheet-like object in a printing state wherein printed images mixedly include non-defective and defective printed images are identified on the basis of an inspection result. Different identification information are imparted to the sheet-like object in the printing state wherein all the images are defective and the printed sheet-like object in the printing state mixedly including non-defective and defective images on the basis of identification results. A sheet-like object identification apparatus is also disclosed.
A printer includes a communication unit which receives a plurality of pictures to be printed, in which pictures video on a TV are captured, a command receiving unit which receives a user input of a print setting for specifying a sectioning method of a print sheet, an outputting unit which prints the received pictures on the print sheet according to the print setting, and a control unit which controls the outputting unit to stand by for the pictures until they are received by the number corresponding to number of printing areas obtained by sectioning the print sheet.
An apparatus and process for inspecting print material having a reference template generator circuit, a defect detector circuit for comparing a target image to a reference image and a defect rejecter circuit for determining the acceptability of the target image. The reference template generator circuit is made up of a pixel intensity range circuit, a pixel classifier circuit and a reference address circuit. Each pixel data of the target image is compared, according to the pixel classification of the pixel data, to each pixel data of the reference image. The flaw severity code is generated from the reference pixel comparison, which is then weighted and accumulated for the image area. The weighted sum of the occurrences of the flaw severity codes is compared with the user specified threshold for determining the acceptability of the test sample. Each entry of the look-up table contains a corresponding flaw severity code.
A print tone measuring method includes a reference paper image pickup step for reading an image of reference paper to obtain first image data, a designated control point setting step for setting designated control points, a first reference point setting step for setting a pair of first reference points for specifying image positions, a print reading step for reading an image of an actual print to obtain second image data, a second reference point setting step for setting a pair of second reference points corresponding to the first reference points, a calculating step for calculating positions of corresponding control points corresponding to the designated control points from the first reference points and the second reference points, an extracting step for extracting image data adjacent each of the designated control points and image data adjacent each of the corresponding control points, and a correcting step for correcting the position of each corresponding control point in the second image data by comparing the image data adjacent each designated control point and the image data adjacent each corresponding control point.
For manufacturing security documents, a plurality of security documents are printed on a sheet. The sheets are being processed in batches (15a, 15b). Each sheet carries a unique, machine readable identifier. During manufacturing, the batches are processed by several printing stations (10). At each printing station, the identifiers are read by a local computer (13) attributed to the printing station. The results are transferred upon request in data packets to a central data base (16). Each data packet contains the information for several sheets, which obviates the need to transfer the corresponding data in real time over the network. To increase security and decrease network dependence, each local computer is equipped with apparatus to check the processing status of a batch autonomously.
