Color Scrambling for Secure Digital Content Distribution

Traditionally the choices made by color separation are expressed as amounts of each of the available colorants to use for each of the reproducible colors. Halftoning then deals with the spatial distribution of colorants, which also results in the nature of their overprinting. However, having a colorant space as the way for color separation to communicate with halftoning gives access only to some of the possible printed patterns that a given printing system is capable of and therefore only to a reduced range of print attributes. In the present paper a method – HANS – is proposed to gain access to all possible, printable patterns by specifying relative area coverages of a printing system’s Neugebauer primaries instead of only colorant amounts. This results in delivering prints with more optimal print attributes than were possible using existing methods, allowing for up to 34% less ink use while delivering a 10% greater color gamut on a test printing system using CMYKcm inks.