System and method for accelerated data recompression

DETAILED DESCRIPTION The present invention fulfills the above-described and other needs by providing a data recompression system which does not need to swap an entire uncompressed image to and from main memory during each iterative data recompression step.
A data recompression system constructed in accordance with the present invention includes a main memory for storing image data, and a decompression device which receives compressed data from the main memory and decompresses it to produce discrete blocks of decompressed data.
A high-speed dedicated buffer, separate from the main memory and connected to the decompression device, is used by the decompression device to store one block, or a limited number of blocks, of decompressed data at a time.
The blocks of data are then received one at a time by a data compression device taking input directly from the buffer.
The compression device compresses the uncompressed data blocks, and writes them back to the main memory, one block at a time.
Thus, an entire compressed image stored in main memory is decompressed and recompressed one block at a time, and uncompressed image data need not be swapped to and from main memory.
As a result, overall speed of the data recompression process is significantly increased.
Further features of the present invention are explained hereinafter with reference to illustrative examples shown in the accompanying drawings.