The following appears on 4-trader.com
By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Computer Weekly News — A patent application by the inventor CAMPBELL, James B. (Beaverton, OR), filed on June 20, 2012, was made available online on January 2, 2014, according to news reporting originating from Washington, D.C., by VerticalNews correspondents.
This patent application is assigned to Xerox Corporation.
The following quote was obtained by the news editors from the background information supplied by the inventors: “The present disclosure is generally related to color and gray content detection in image data so that a billing structure for outputting documents is determined.
“Image data comprises a number of pixels having a number of components that contribute to defining the image, such as color and intensity. The image data generally includes various color or gray levels, which contribute to the intensity of each pixel in the image. Each pixel of the image is assigned a number representing the amount of light or gray level for that space at that particular spot; i.e., the shade of gray in the pixel. Binary image data has two possible values for each pixel, ON (represented by the number ‘1’) or OFF (represented by the number ‘0’). Images that have a large range of shades are referred to as grayscale images. For example, grayscale images have an 8-bit value per pixel comprising 256 tones or shades of gray for each pixel in the image (gray level of 0 to 255). Grayscale image data may also be referred to as continuous tone or contone image data. The pixels in a color image may be defined in terms of a color space, typically with a number of values or planes, such as three (e.g. RGB, CIELab) or four (e.g., CMYK–C for cyan, M for magenta, Y for yellow, and K for black).
“When outputting image data to an output device (e.g., copier, printer, or multi-function device (MFD)), a percentage scale may be used to identify how much ink is employed for a print job. Such information may typically be used for billing a customer for print jobs. For example, some methods employ a billing strategy based on an estimated amount of ink or toner consumption; others bill customers based on a print mode selection (e.g., draft, standard, color, enhanced, etc.) of the output device. In dynamic print job environments, because printing using black ink or toner is less expensive than using colored ink or toner, billing is often based on the amount of color content contained in the job to be printed. In order to bill customers for color printing, color detection is an important feature required in an image path. Color detection is used to analyze documents for presence of color as well as an amount of color in order to bill customers accordingly. Generally, the higher the presence and amount of color in a document, the higher the cost.
“Although pixels in the hardware on the binary output at the back end of the image path can be counted, without knowledge of the user specified color versus gray, or device gray line, the gray content of the original image data can not necessarily be determined. For example, when a PDL interpreter and the copy image path generate a balanced gray using composite gray, then backend pixel counters cannot distinguish intended gray from marked color.
