Abstract
This paper presents our contribution for the compression of images of old Arabic Manuscripts. Our method of compression is based on the segmentation of the images in three blocks: text, graphics and background, then each block will undergo a different compression method. We present two parts: first, while developing a characteristic extractor based on the wavelet transform and statistical characteristics, we propose an algorithm of segmentation based on the classification of old documents images. Second, we present the education and the implementation of a compression method by using the wavelet transform. This method comprises three steps: the compression of the text blocks, the background blocks, and the graphics blocks.