Kyocera Document Solutions Inc.

Stephen L Schafer

Dongpei Su

Michael M Chang

Kendrick Esperanza Wong

Kenneth Allen Schmidt

Sheng Li

Alfred Abkarian

Larry Lubman

Jayant Bhatt

Guo Li

The disclosure is directed towards a system and method for using a multicore processor to process a printer definition language (PDL). The system improves efficiency by supporting parallel processing of many commonly used PDLs, while also supporting serial processing of many legacy PDLs. When processing a PDL, the system relies on several stages, including a parsing stage, a printer drawings services stage, and a graphic services stage, which includes order generation. The system provides flexibility by permitting function calls of common PDLs to be either asynchronous requests or blocking synchronous requests. Because legacy PDLs are executed serially, legacy PDL requests are considered to be blocking synchronous requests. The system provides a level of abstraction at the PDL level by allowing multiple requests to be combined into a compound asynchronous request. The system also improves accuracy by notifying the original caller of a request about an error during error handling.

Multicore printer definition language processing

An example embodiment may involve obtaining an m&#xd7;n pixel cell from an input image. Each of the m&#xd7;n pixels in the m&#xd7;n pixel cell may be associated with at least one color value. An m&#xd7;n attribute cell may be determined, elements of which may be associated in a one-to-one fashion with respective pixels in the m&#xd7;n pixel cell. The m&#xd7;n pixel cell may be compressed in a lossy fashion, and the m&#xd7;n attribute cell may be compressed in a lossless fashion. Compression of the m&#xd7;n pixel cell may be based on at least part of the m&#xd7;n attribute cell. An interleaved representation of the compressed m&#xd7;n pixel cell and the compressed m&#xd7;n attribute cell may be written to an output medium.

Digital image attribute plane compression

An example embodiment may involve obtaining an a&#xd7;b pixel macro-cell from an input image. The a&#xd7;b pixel macro-cell may contain 4 non-overlapping m&#xd7;n pixel cells. The a&#xd7;b pixels in the a&#xd7;b pixel macro-cell may have respective color values and may be associated with respective object type tags. The example embodiment may also include selecting a compression technique to either (i) compress the a&#xd7;b pixel macro-cell as a whole, or (ii) compress the a&#xd7;b pixel macro-cell by compressing each of the 4 non-overlapping m&#xd7;n pixel cells separately. The example embodiment may further include compressing the a&#xd7;b pixel macro-cell according to the selected compression technique, and writing a representation of the compressed a&#xd7;b pixel macro-cell to a computer-readable output medium.

Digital image color plane compression

An example embodiment may involve obtaining an a&#xd7;b pixel macro-cell from an image with one or more color planes, and an a&#xd7;b attribute macro-cell. The a&#xd7;b pixel macro-cell may contain 4 non-overlapping m&#xd7;n pixel cells, and the a&#xd7;b attribute macro-cell may contain 4 non-overlapping m&#xd7;n attribute cells. The pixels in the a&#xd7;b pixel macro-cell may be associated with respective color values. The example embodiment may also involve determining 4 attribute output values associated respectively with the 4 non-overlapping m&#xd7;n attribute cells. The example embodiment may further involve determining 1 to 4 color-plane output values for the non-overlapping m&#xd7;n pixel cells, and writing an interleaved representation of the 4 attribute output values and the determined color-plane output values.

Interleaved encoding of compressed attribute and color planes

Based on an m&#xd7;n halftone matrix and an m&#xd7;n pixel block of an image, an m&#xd7;n halftone version of the m&#xd7;n pixel block may be determined. An n-way interleave may be performed on rows of the m&#xd7;n halftone version to create an mn&#xd7;1 halftone segment. The mn&#xd7;1 halftone segment may be compared to one or more halftone segments in a buffer. Based on the comparison, a literal code word and a representation of the mn&#xd7;1 halftone segment may be output, and the representation of the mn&#xd7;1 halftone segment may be written to the buffer. Alternatively, a repeat code word and a repeat value may be output, and at least one representation of the mn&#xd7;1 halftone segment may be written to the buffer.

Compression of halftoned digital images

An m&#xd7;n pixel cell may be obtained from an input image, each of the pixels having a respective color value. A characterization of the cell may be determined, including determining a lowest color value and a highest color value of the pixels cell. A difference between the highest color value and the lowest color value may be calculated. If the difference is less than or equal to a threshold difference, an output color value inclusively between the highest color value and the lowest color value may be selected, and a first representation of the output color value may be written to an output medium. If the difference is greater than the threshold difference, multiple output color values may be selected, and a second representation of the multiple output color values may be written to the output medium.

Growing community of inventors

El Segundo, CA, United States of America

Stephen L Schafer