For a purely static image (repeated throughout the report on say the title and page headers) I declared a variable of type String and set it to the Base64 encoded image data. I added the commons-codec-1.9.jar to the project's build path as an external jar. Then for the image Expression - I set it to new ByteArrayInputStream(new org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64().decodeBase64($V{ImageVariable}.getBytes("UTF-8"))) Note that I had to fully qualify the apache commons Base64 class. I set the evaluation time to 'Report' and 'Using Cache' to true.