MRC for compression of colored engravings

The William Blake Archive is a multimedia digital archive that provides structured access to high-quality electronic reproductions of work authored by the great eighteenth-century poet and painter William Blake. Due to the specific nature of a large group of Blake´s paintings (extensive high frequency content as the result of the under-lying engraved image), they are not suitable for very efficient compression that meets both rate and distortion criteria at the same time. This paper presents original modification of Mixed Raster Content (MRC) compression scheme -initially developed for the compression of compound documents- for the compression of non-compound documents (color engravings). The results, as demonstrated, were digital facsimiles that showed exceptional fidelity to their prototypes at low bit-rates, especially when compared to alternate compression methods such as JPEG and JPEG2000.