Fully automatic pasting of images into compressed pre-collated documents

A digital image processing method comprising:

• scanning a base printed document to generate a corresponding base digital image, said base document comprising information areas and background areas wherein at least one of said background areas is a paste location;
• scanning a secondary printed document to generate a secondary base digital image;
• performing a compression operation on the base digital image and the secondary digital image to generate compressed base and secondary digital images, respectively, each comprising a plurality of data blocks;
• segmenting the compressed base digital image into information data blocks corresponding to the information areas of said base document and background data blocks corresponding to the background areas of said base document;
• determining the spatial paste-area requirements for pasting the secondary digital image into the base digital image;
• based upon said segmented compressed base digital image, selecting a background area in said base digital image having a size sufficient to accommodate said secondary digital image;
• and,
• electronically pasting said compressed secondary digital image into the compressed base digital image at a location corresponding to the selected background area in said base digital image.

An image reproduction apparatus comprising:

• a scanner for deriving digital image data from first and second documents;
• a printer for receiving digital image data and printing a hard-copy output representation of said received digital image data;
• an image processing unit for receiving digital image data from said scanner, processing said digital image data, and transmitting said digital image data to said printer, said image processing unit adapted to process compressed data and comprising:
• means for deriving the spatial size of the second digital image,
• means for performing a compression operation on digital image data of first and second digital images scanned by said scanner to generate a plurality of data blocks for each of said first and second images, each of said data blocks having a size and an average luminance value,
• means for identifying each of said data blocks of said first image as an information block associated with an information area of said first digital image or a background block associated with a background area of said first digital image without fully decompressing said data blocks of said first digital image based upon the size and average luminance value of said block,
• means for locating groups of adjacent background blocks of said first image,
• means for identifying one of said groups of adjacent background data blocks of said first image as representing a paste location in said first digital image having a spatial size at least as large as said spatial size of said second digital image, and,
• means for electronically substituting the data blocks of said second digital image for the identified data blocks of said first image associated with said paste location.