The Thermo-Autochrome(TA) System is a revolutionary printing system for production of high quality color prints. It is also a highly-reliable maintenance-free system based on thermal printing technology. The TA technology comprises two key material technologies: 1)the hat-responsive microcapsules which react in different temprature ranges 2)diazonium salts which decomposes on exposure to UV light as color forming materials. The TA system produces high resolution photo-quality color prints with rich tonal gradation because TA paper generates tonal YMC images within each pixel. The TA system eliminates the need for ink cartridges or ink ribbon which must be disposed as plastic waste, making it the eco-friendly alternative.

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Fuji Photo Film has developed a new continuous tone, direct thermal full color hard copy system called "TA"(Thermo-Autochrome). Its key technology mainly resides in the new thermal media "TA paper" which contains all the chemical components needed to develop three primary colors (cyan, magenta and yellow) in its multi-layer structure. Color discrimination is achieved by designing these layers to react in different temperature ranges and to be fixed by UV light after each color development. The TA system has a big advantage over conventional hard copy systems of accompanying no waste such as ink ribbons or ink cartridges. This paper describes the mechanism of image formation and the basic configuration of printer. It also describes technical points of TA in comparison with D2T2, and the future of this new system.

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The controlling factors of material permeability which occurs from the glass transition phenomenon of polymer membranes such as polyurea-urethane upon heating for the period of about 10 msec were studied. Chemicals, material composition, and detailed conditions which significantly influence the glass transition point were found, Utilizing these findings several novel recording materials including direct thermal full color recording which employs new encapsulated compounds and new imaging processes were developed.

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In this paper, a novel technique to rotate and enlarge or reduce digital images is proposed. The complex-log mapping plays an important role in the proposed method. By the complex-log mapping, the original images are mapped from the orthogonal coordinate system to the polar coordinate system. The rotation and enlargement or reduction of original images is achieved by simple shifts of the mapped images. And the rotated and enlarged or reduced images are obtained by the inverse complex-log mapping. Because such a mapping process depends on only the size of images, mapping process can be calculated previously as a mapping table. By using this table, the mapping process is achieved by simple substitution of data according to it. So, the proposed method offers the fast image processing technique. The processing sample is included to show the efficiency of proposed method.

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In this paper we propose a new encoding algorithm for pictures which decomposes the picture matrix A to singular values and eigen vectors of AA^T and A^TA based on the input picture statistics and then encodes the singular values and DCT coefficients of eigen vectors by PCM. The energy packing efficiency of the proposed algolithm is very high and the simulation results show the excellent performance of the algolithm for the encoding of both flat and edged pictures from the view point of the signal to noise ratio of the restored pictures and the coding efficiency.

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In this paper, we propose an image coding method using characteristics of wavelet coefficients. In this coding method, the wavelet coefficients are coded by QM-Coder, which is a sort of alithmetic coding, and using correlations of coefficients in high frequency bands, we define conditions to estimate probability of binary data's occurrences. The performance of proposed coding method is compared with the JPEG method, and simulation results are shown.

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