Perceived color graininess is an important image artifact affecting image quality of a digital printing system, which can be attributed to various parts of a digital printing system such as colorant physical properties, digital halftone design, etc. The conventional approach to quantifying color granularity on a printing system is to conduct measurements on individual color channels. While this is an effective way to measure each color channel's influence on color granularity, it fails to quantify the overall impact in reality where most of the image is composed of more than one colorant. Furthermore, it is possible to optimize the overall system performance in terms of color graininess if the cross interaction among different color channels is known. In this paper, we propose to create a multidimensional grain profile in the Profile Connection Space (PICS) to describe the entire system performance in perceived color graininess.
Chunghui Kuo, Yee Ng, Di Lai, "Grain Profile of a Printing System" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP23), 2007, pp 400 - 403, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2007.23.1.art00092_1