An image capturing unit includes a sensor unit that image-captures a predetermined area including a subject; and a reference chart unit that is arranged in the predetermined area and captured with the subject by the sensor unit.

An image forming apparatus includes an image forming section for forming an image on a transfer medium, a conveyance section for conveying the transfer medium, and a control section for controlling image formation and conveyance. The control section is capable of acquiring an image reading result for a transfer medium on which an image is formed and determining whether the transfer medium is faulty, and, if the transfer medium is determined to be faulty and there are a plurality of output destinations for faulty transfer media which are the transfer medium determined to be faulty and transfer media having already been fed after the transfer medium determined to be faulty, gives a warning about removal of the faulty transfer media for each output destination.

Techniques for interactively determining/visualizing the color content of a source image and how the corresponding image data is mapped to device colors are described herein. For example, the color content of a digital image can be converted between different color spaces to identify gamut limitations of an output device (e.g., a printing assembly), discover color(s) that cannot be accurately reproduced, etc. Color space conversions enable the transformation of the color content of the digital image from device-specific colorants to a device-independent representation (and vice versa). In some embodiments, these transformations are facilitated using lookup tables that are implemented in graphical processing unit-resident memory.

An image forming apparatus is configured to communicate with an external controller configured to generate a job, and includes one or more controllers having one or more processors and one or more memories, the one or more controllers being configured to acquire an image from a first job upon receiving the first job from the external controller and register a reference image generated from the image, to execute inspection processing upon receiving a second job from the external controller, and to perform control to delete the reference image registered upon receiving a cancellation instruction to cancel the second job from the external controller.

An image capturing unit includes a sensor unit that image-captures a predetermined area including a subject; and a reference chart unit that is arranged in the predetermined area and captured with the subject by the sensor unit.

Determination is made as to whether or not image data inputted in a state where a mode for confirming a print result is set in a maintenance mode used by a service person includes information that indicates data for maintenance, and in a case that it is determined that the information is included, image formation is performed after superimposing a particular pattern on the image data, and in a case that it is determined that the information is not included, image formation in accordance with the image data is performed after waiting for the mode to be released.

A method for detecting printing defects includes, with a physical computing system, creating a matched reference image from a digital image, colors of said matched reference image being closer matched to a scanned image of said digital image. The method further includes, with said physical computing system, determining a color difference between corresponding points on said matched reference image and said scanned image; and with said physical computing system, identifying points that have said color distance greater than a predefined threshold as potential defects.

An image forming apparatus, guide providing method thereof, cloud server and error analyzing method thereof are provided. The image forming apparatus may include a scanner configured to scan a script and generate a scan image, a communicator configured to communicate with a cloud server, a display configured display a screen, and a processor configured to control the communicator to transmit the generated scan image to a cloud server, and in response to receiving an error solution guide of the scan image from the cloud server, control the display to display the received error solution guide.

A printing apparatus comprises: a printing section that prints out print data onto a medium; an imaging section that captures an image of a print result on the medium; and an error notification section that performs error notification in a case of occurrence of an error during the printing of the print data. The error notification section judges whether to issue an error notice or not. In a case of an affirmative judgment to issue the error notice, the error notification section acquires a print image showing the print result by using the imaging section and transmits the acquired print image together with the error notice.

An image inspection system includes a processor and an inspection execution unit that performs an image inspection of a printed matter, in which the processor is configured to acquire first position information that is information on a position of the image inspection set in image data and to acquire second position information that is information on positions of the respective image data in data for printing in which the plural image data are arranged, and the inspection execution unit performs the image inspection of a printed matter on which the data for printing are printed using the first position information and the second position information.