IMAGE COMPRESSION METHOD

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To solve the problem that effective compression is impossible due to frequent inversion of data components in the main scanning direction in run length compression especially in the case that a continuous length (the number of dots) of the same component is shorter than the data length representating the continuous length. SOLUTION: In an image compression method of compressing a binary image consisting of dots of a first value and a second value, the binary image is scanned in the main scanning direction to detect the dot of the first value, and the coordinate position of the detected dot is taken as a start point to detect a rectangular area consisting of the dots of the first value by scanning in the main scanning direction and a sub-scanning direction, and the detected rectangular area is encoded by information of the position and the size to compress the binary image. COPYRIGHT: (C)2004,JPO