Systems and methods of operation for an image processor system to process images to locate two-dimensional regions which are likely to contain machine-readable symbol data or text. Such regions of interest (ROIs) may be preserved at full resolution, while the contents of non-ROIs are averaged into a single pixel value. Transition densities in an image may be converted into a numeric value. Such transition densities may be indicative of the presence of data of interest, such as textual data and/or machine-readable symbol data. The pixels values for the pixels in the ROIs may be sent to a decoder unchanged (i.e., full resolution), which absolves the decoder from having to perform any ROI location computations. Modified or altered images may be compressed to much smaller size files while maintaining lossless ROIs, which allows for transmission of such images to processor-based devices over a data communications channel in real time.