MRC Compression of Compound Documents Using Threshold Segmentation, Iterative Data-Filling and H.264/AVC-INTRA

The Mixed Raster Content (MRC) ITU document compression standard (T.44) specifies a multi-layer representation of a compound document. It is expected that higher compression can be achieved if more efficient compression standards are used to compress each layer. In this paper we present an MRC compound document codec that uses H.264/AVC operating in INTRA mode to encode Background/Foreground layers and JBIG2 to encode the binary Mask layer. We also present a threshold-based layer segmentation algorithm and an iterative data-filling algorithm for redundant regions. The result is an unrivaled performance for compressing compound documents as demonstrated by our experiments.