Compressed-domain document retrieval and analysis

In this paper, we first describe a structural compression technique which has been designed to facilitate document text image storage, retrieval, and processing. This technique provides an efficient representation of textural images and lends itself to lossy compression, progressive transmission, direct access to sub-regions of the document and document processing in the compressed domain. We describe a data structure which can be used to efficiently store the compressed information, provide algorithms for creating and manipulating it, and present results of document processing on images compressed form the University of Washington database.