Estimating toner usage with laser electrophotographic printers

Accurate estimation of toner usage is an area of on-going importance for laser, electrophotographic (EP) printers. We propose a new two-stage approach in which we first predict on a pixel-by-pixel basis, the absorptance from printed and scanned pages. We then form a weighted sum of these pixel values to predict overall toner usage on the printed page. The weights are chosen by least-squares regression to toner usage measured with a set of printed test pages. Our twostage predictor significantly outperforms existing methods that are based on a simple pixel counting strategy in terms of both accuracy and robustness of the predictions.