It's all about the image

10.07.2006
Xerox Corp. acknowledges that it has a bit of an image problem. "Many people still mostly associate us with the original Xerox product, the copier," says the US$16 billion company's new chief technology officer, Sophie Vandebroek.

But Vandebroek and the 600 scientists, engineers and software developers she leads in the Xerox Innovation Group (XIG) are working hard to change that perception. The company is in the digital- and paper-document management business now, and it's earning two patents a day on technologies -- from microprocessors to color sensors and steganography -- that often originate within XIG.

The company's annual report refers to "the True Colors of Xerox," meaning corporate values such as customer service, technological innovation and social responsibility. But the phrase has literal meaning as well. Here are a few of the research projects going on in the Color Studio at XIG's Webster, N.Y., campus.

-- The human eye can distinguish 1 million colors, but printers have a color "gamut" of just half that number. XIG has developed a process called spatial gamut mapping that fills in the missing colors with colors that the eye and brain will interpret as more detailed and realistic than would be the case if the most accurate colors were chosen based on a spectrometer. "Sometimes perception trumps accuracy as a goal," says color researcher Karen Braun.

-- In commercial printing, consistency counts. The first brochure should look just like the last one. So Xerox has figured out a way to equip printers with color sensors that watch pages as they fly by at 2 feet per second and tweak colors as the print job proceeds. The sensors and controllers can detect and correct color deviations far faster and more accurately than a human operator working with manual controls, says researcher L.K. Meshta.

-- A number of projects deal with security -- such as how to prevent counterfeiting. One, called Gloss Marks, can print an image that appears to have a second image embedded in it -- a little like a hologram -- in one pass. The second image can't be copied. And an image containing Correlation Marks looks normal but reveals a secret message when overlaid with a special grid.