Patent ID: 7085020

Claim:
An apparatus for lossless compression of bi-tonal raster data, the apparatus comprising: a data channel configured to carry a raster data stream from a print controller to a print mechanism, the raster data stream comprising a plurality of pels; a plurality of pattern detection modules, including a half-tone pattern detection module, a solid pattern detection module, an edge pattern detection module, and a verbatim data transfer module configured to receive raster data, and provide verbatim raster data, the verbatim raster data being an identical and lossless representation of the raster data, the pattern detection modules operably connected to the data channel and configured to receive raster data, each of the pattern detection modules further configured to detect a separate type of pattern in the raster data, each pattern capable of a separate lossless representation; a pattern selection module configured to select the lossless representation that is most compact; a formatting module configured to place the selected lossless representation into a compressed data stream.