Compression of bank cheque images based on layout knowledge

In this paper a scheme for bank cheque images compression based on layout knowledge is proposed. The layout structure of the cheques is analyzed and the nonessential parts are located. These parts, viz., the background and the printed information, are eliminated from the original image. The resulting image contains some noise that are eliminated by a filtering operation. The image is enclosed to eliminate some uninformative parts. The final image has only the filled information. The digitized image can be easily reconstructed by restoring the filled information and summing it with background and printed information. The proposed compression scheme is tested by Brazilian bank cheques. Comparisons with other compression schemes, shows that the proposed scheme performs significantly better in terms of the compression efficiency, maintaining the visual quality.