Details:
Summary:
Modern digital prepress production is based on the manipulation of high resolution scanned pictures. The video monitors that are used to display and edit these images have far less resolution than the original picture. This necessitates a reduction of detail in images displayed on the screen. With the use of existing hardware and data formats the reading of an abstract (reduced, zoomed-down) digital image can take significantly more than one minute. The patent addresses this and other related problems of prepress technology. Its major points are: necessitates a reduction of detail in images displayed on the screen. With the use of existing hardware and data formats the reading of an abstract (reduced, zoomed-down) digital image can take significantly more than one minute. The patent addresses this and other related problems of prepress technology. Its major points are: 1. The proposed storage format can greatly lessen the time needed to read a abstracted image, typically by a factor of 10. This difference is more than qualitative. Waiting more than a minute to load an image is unacceptable for an interactive system, waiting 10 seconds is reasonable. 2. The storage format supports efficient reading of multi-scale abstractions. 3. The image file size remains the same as in current formats. 4. Essentially no penalty is imposed by using this new format for any operation that uses the image at full resolution. In particular, the speed of scanning the image and storing the image on disk, in the new format, is not diminished from the current methods. 5. Additionally, an efficient method for rotating images in this format is demonstrated that is many times faster than methods currently employed. The last section gives benchmarks that demonstrate the utility of this patent for reading an abstracted image.