EROS is the largest database in the world of high resolution art pictures. The TSAR project is designed to open it in a secure, efficient and user-friendly way that involves cryptography and watermarking as well as compression and region-level representation abilities. This paper more particularly addresses the two last points. The LAR codec is first presented as a suitable solution for picture encoding with compression ranging from highly lossy to lossless. Then, we detail the concept of self-extracting region representation, which consists of performing a segmentation process at both the coder and decoder from a highly compressed image, and later locally enhancing the image in a region of interest. The overall scheme provides an efficient, consistent solution for advanced data browsing.