The emerging JBIG2 standard allows compliant encoders to achieve very high compression rates on bi-level images, especially when images are properly segmented into regions of line-art, halftones and text. We propose a fast method that is very effective at separating text from non-text regions, even when the regions are nonrectangular or have skew. Our method can also detect regions of reverse-coloured text. In most cases, our method increases the compression performance of the encoder. More

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... rtantly, our method can improve encoding speeds considerably, often by an order of magnitude.