Patent ID: 8515163

Claim:
A system, comprising: a processor; and a program of instructions executable by the processor to perform a method of identifying and classifying regions of a digital image, said method comprising: inputting an image as a color digital image; obtaining information that identifies color and photo regions of said color digital image; classifying color, photo, non-color and non-photo regions of said color digital image based upon said identifying information; and individually compressing said color, non-color, photo and non-photo regions based on a quality characteristic of each of said regions, wherein said photo regions are classified by the following steps: transforming said color digital image to gray scale; applying a first median filtering method to said gray scale image creating a first filtered image; applying a second median filtering method to said gray scale image creating a second filtered image; creating a difference image from between said first and second filtered images; converting said difference image to a binary image; obtaining a set of bounding boxes of black pixels in said binary image through a connected components method; and applying a size analysis to said connected components wherein connected components having a size below a predetermined threshold are marked as non-photo regions and remaining bounding boxes of said connected components are photo regions.