Patent ID: 7403661

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a blob identifier that identifies one or more blobs in image data; a blob mapper that assigns a color index to each of one or more blobs based on a color property of each of the blobs; a blob clusterer that assigns the blobs to one or more binary foreground planes and a grayscale background plane based on the color index of each of the blobs to generate N-layer image data; a blob identification module to maintain a global table of blobs that are no longer active and to identify inner blobs; a blob analyzing module to analyze the inner blobs to determine if they represent background data, wherein the image data of the inner blobs that represent background data are merged into the grayscale background plane and inner blobs that do not represent background data are maintained as valid blobs; and data of the one or more assigned binary foreground planes and the grayscale background plane are compressed by applying separate compression algorithms to each binary foreground plane data and grayscale background plane data.