Toner Psychophysics

 

      

 

 

Psychophysics research at Xerox centered on models of toner deposition, imaging optics, and mechanical motion on text, line graphics, and halftones and their interaction with the human visual system.

 

The Webster Research Center was where I began to appreciate that an imaging chain model was not just an abstract concept that could be used to organize physiological and psychophysical results from vision research. Such models also afforded the ability to integrate this research with the properties (collected together and reformulated as transfer functions) of physical devices and thereby make it possible to characterize human performance on specific tasks. I came to understand how these models were more than academic exercises; their application had real commercial value.

 

One such series of experiments used to define the models considered the relation between the losses due to the optical transfer function of the eye and the subsequent neural processing in the eye and brain on the perceived sharpness of squarewave gratings.