Networking digital document images

Digital libraries create new services and open rare collections to a larger and wider audience. The development of online digital libraries in image mode is today limited by the narrow bandwidth of the network and the heavy storage requirements. Moreover, efficient networking of text content images requires specific compression schemes and particular file formats that describe the contents of the images and provide additional information such as document layout descriptions. The paper describes problems concerning the networking of digital document images and provides solutions for image compression. A file format, which enables editing and annotation, is presented. Our proposal mainly uses automatic document layout analysis algorithms, which constitutes a new field of application for this research area. This work, granted by the European community, has been applied to 16^th century books for the project DEBORA