Enhanced JBIG-based compression for satisfying objectives

The main objectives of an engineering document management (EDM) system are outlined. Existing image compression algorithms (eg. ITU Group 4 and JBIG) offer efficient solutions to the storage problem but do not sufficiently support other objectives such as spatial access and fast decoding. We propose a novel method based on JBIG, in which the other objectives are also met. The compression performance of the proposed method is only 10 % worse than that of JBIG, and at the same time, spatial access to a compressed file is achieved. The method is also 2.5 times faster in decompression than JBIG. This speed up is comparable to the Group 4 standard, but with better compression performance. The proposed method is applicable not only to engineering drawings but to binary images in any document imaging system. Subject terms: Image compression; document imaging; binary images; lossless compression. # short version of the paper [1] was presented in Picture Coding Symposium 1997. * author for correspondence