Evaluation of raster image compression in the context of large format document processing

We investigate the task of wide format still image manipulation and compression, within the framework of a document printing and copying data path. A typical document processing chain can benefit from the use of data compression, especially when it manages wide format color documents. In order to develop a new approach to use data compression for wide format printing systems, we expose in this article the benchmarking process of compression applied to large documents. Standard algorithms, from the imaging and document processing industry have been chosen for the compression of wide format color raster images. A database of image files has been created and classified for this purpose. The goal is to evaluate the performance in terms of data-flow reduction, along with quality losses in case of lossy compression. For the sake of a precise evaluation of performance of these compression algorithms, we include time measurements of the sole compression and decompression processes. A comparison of the memory footprint of each compression and decompression algorithms helps also to appreciate their resource consumptions.