While I cannot share all my work from my summer at HP due to confidentiality, my manager gracefully allowed me to share two of the smaller projects which I engaged in.
Scanline Deformation Testing
With an outer frame formed from plastic and glass, the heating and cooling of our scan bar's body deforms it due to variance in each material's thermal expansion coefficient. With a new scan bar under development which potentially produces more heat than previous versions, and since tolerance in lens placement relative to paper path is quite small, my job was to come up with ways to test for deformation under both room temperature conditions as well as temperature and humidity extremes to determine if and how image quality would be affected under these conditions. The device to the right was one simple testing tool which I created to allow us to quickly analyze the overall bar deformation when exposed to each of these temperature conditions. With this and much more data, I characterized this relationship, and found major flaws in the ways in which our scan bars were being produced.
Color Replication
One way in which we characterize scan quality is through it's ability to replicate color. While we could previously approximate our scanner's quality through a manual analysis of a dozen different color targets, I coded a new MatLab script which could import data from multiple different scanners and compare color replication to their known color value to analyze the error in color replication across 240 different color targets.
