Secure layer based compound image compression using XML compression

Information explosion along with the tremendous growth in software and hardware technology are moving industries, educational institutions, organizations towards `paperless´ environment. This change has a direct impact on the amount of information digitized, thus increasing the need for efficient storage mechanisms. Along with compact storage requirement, security is also considered important during image transmission and storage. Presently, digitized information mostly consist of compound images, which are a combination of different data types like text, graphics, line art, photographs, etc. Application of natural image compression does not produce quality compression and a layer based compression is one of the frequently used solution to compress these kind of images. This paper proposes a novel layer based compound image compression technique that uses XML compression and JPEG to compress data. An encryption algorithm is used to encrypt the compressed image so as to protect the image during transmission. Care is taken to produce lossless compression for text part of the image and to improve the quality of the image as a whole after decompression. Experimental results were conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed compressor.