Lossless, near-lossless, and refinement coding of bilevel images

  • Authors:
  • B. Martins;S. Forchhammer

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Telecommun., Tech. Univ., Lyngby;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

We present general and unified algorithms for lossy/lossless coding of bilevel images. The compression is realized by applying arithmetic coding to conditional probabilities. As in the current JBIG standard the conditioning may be specified by a template. For better compression, the more general free tree may be used. Loss may be introduced in a preprocess on the encoding side to increase compression. The primary algorithm is a rate-distortion controlled greedy flipping of pixels. Though being general, the algorithms are primarily aimed at material containing half-toned images as a supplement to the specialized soft pattern matching techniques that work better for text. Template based refinement coding is applied for lossy-to-lossless refinement. Introducing only a small amount of loss in half-toned test images, compression is increased by up to a factor of four compared with JBIG. Lossy, lossless, and refinement decoding speed and lossless encoding speed are less than a factor of two slower than JBIG. The (de)coding method is proposed as part of JBIG2, an emerging international standard for lossless/lossy compression of bilevel images