METHOD, APPARATUS AND COMPUTER PROGRAM PRODUCT FOR OBJECT-BASED RASTER IMAGING

摘要

The invention improves the performance of systems that process page description languages. The invention generates objects that represent graphical aspects of a visually perceivable image. These objects can be rasterized in parallel to generate an object raster representation of each object. Sampled images (including hierarchical multiple-resolution sampled images) can also be separately processed and stored within the file system for repeated access. A device dependent raster is generated by assembling the contribution made by each object raster representation. One aspect of the invention allows for the sending of the document representation as a stream of objects to the presentation device (thus, off-loading the PDL processing from the raster image processor). The invention also allows for post-PDL processing manipulation of the objects (for example, to reference a high resolution version of a sampled image instead of a low resolution version of the image). Another aspect of the invention reduces the number of generated graphical objects by maintaining PDL objects that contain PDL information along with image objects that contain sampled image data. These two aspects of the invention can be combined as appropriate for performance considerations.