Synthesis of images of historical documents for Web visualization

This paper describes a system for efficient storage and network transmission of images of historical documents. The images are segmented into two classes (paper and ink) with the use of an entropy-based segmentation algorithm. The information is then reassembled, synthetising an image visually close to the original document. The synthesis process works in both classes, using information acquired in the segmentation phase. All the information needed to rebuild the final synthetic image occupies, in average, 2 Kbytes performing a very efficient compression scheme.