Described herein is a method for segmenting a document image into a picture component, a special or significant picture component, and a non-picture component. The non-picture component is compressed and may include character blocks. Separately, picture components are compressed with a lossy algorithm or with a preliminary defined compression ratio. Subsequently, the compressed picture component, significant picture component and the compressed non-picture component are saved in memory or in a storage location so that the document image may be recomposed based on the compressed picture component or compressed significant picture component and the compressed non-picture component.