On-line compression of high precision printer images by evolvable hardware

This paper describes an image compression system based on evolvable hardware (EHW) for high precision printers (HPP). These printers are especially flexible for book publishing, but require large disk space for images, in particular those of higher resolution. To increase the printing speed and reduce the disk space, the images should be compressed. The system for this compression must be (1) adaptive, so that it changes depending on image characteristics and (2) on-line, which means implemented in hardware. The standard compression methods have a simple template change strategy which is not efficient for the images of HPP. We used an EHW system for compressing HPP images in real time. The EHW is a type of adaptive hardware which allows evolutionary algorithms to change the hardware configuration in real time. It works as fast as other compression systems (like the JBIG standard), but changes the image modeling to reflect the changes in the image characteristics. Simulation results show more than a 50% increase in compression ratio compared to JBIG for the printer system.