Variational Decompression of Image Data From DjVu Encoded Files

The DjVu file format and image compression techniques are widely used in the archival of digital documents. Its key ingredients are the separation of the document into fore- and background layers and a binary switching mask, followed by a lossy, transform-based compression of the former and a dictionary-based compression of the latter. The lossy compression of the layers is based on a wavelet decomposition and bit truncation, which leads, in particular at higher compression rates, to severe compression artifacts in the standard decompression of the layers. The aim of this paper is to break ground for the variational decompression of DjVu files. To this aim, we provide an in-depth analysis and discussion of the compression standard with a particular focus on modeling data constraints for decompression. This allows to carry out DjVu decompression as regularized inversion of the compression procedure. As particular example, we evaluate the performance of such a framework using total variation and total generalized variation regularization. Furthermore, we provide routines for obtaining the necessary data constraints from a compressed DjVu file and for the forward and adjoint transformation operator involved in DjVu compression.