Optimizing block-thresholding segmentation for multilayer compression of compound images

Compound document images contain graphic or textual content along with pict ures. They are a very common form of documents, found in magazines, brochur es, web sites, etc. We focus our attention on the mixed raster content (MRC ) multilayer approach for compound image compression. We study block thresh olding as a mean to segment an image for MRC, An attempt is made to optimiz e the block threshold in a rate-distortion sense. Also, a fast algorithm is presented to approximate the optimized method. Extensive results are prese nted including rate-distortion curves, segmentation masks and reconstructed images, showing the performance of the proposed algorithm.