Data Compression Algorithms for Visual Information

Abstract

Audio-visual information is one of the richest but also most bandwidth-consuming modes of communication. To meet the requirements of new applications, powerful data compression schemes are needed to reduce the global bit rate drastically. In this paper, we proposed a simple lossless visual image compression scheme that will be used to compress visual images. In this scheme, the two dimensional visual image data is converted to a one dimensional data using our proposed pixel scanning method. The difference between consecutive pixel values in the resulting one dimensional image data is taken and the residues are encoded losslessly using an entropy encoder. The working principles of this our approach is presented together with the image compression algorithm used. We developed a software algorithm and implemented it to compress some standard test images using Huffman style coding techniques in a MATLAB platform.