Compression in a printer pipeline

The role of data compression within a printer pipeline is studied. Hardcopy image compression poses a unique challenge due to the presence of halftoned data used to render continuous tone images on limited resolution devices. We present a quantitative comparison of the compressibility of several halftone patterns. The performance of a variety of lossless and lossy compression algorithms is evaluated. We also address the effect that certain image processing operations, like scaling and enhancement, have on the compression performance.