A methodology is disclosed for processing image data to extract image information of interest from aggregate image information containing other interfering information. Application of the methodology also leads to significant compression in the data, which reduces storage requirements. With the methodology of the invention, an augmented linear decomposition of the image data is performed. Thereafter, components of the image data corresponding to a baseline image, image information introduced by non-regular extraneous factors, and image information related to random noise are removed from the data by suppression of appropriate terms of the linear decomposition. The image data so reduced may contain both image information of interest and image data related to regularly occurring extraneous factors. The image data of interest is removed from such reduced aggregate image data by frequency domain filtering of the reduced aggregate data.