Research Article
An affine symmetric approach to natural image compression
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1145/1374296.1374332, author={Heechan Park and Abhir Bhalerao and Graham Martin and Andy C. Yu}, title={An affine symmetric approach to natural image compression}, proceedings={2nd International ICST Conference on Mobile Multimedia Communications}, publisher={ACM}, proceedings_a={MOBIMEDIA}, year={2006}, month={9}, keywords={Affine transform Image coding.}, doi={10.1145/1374296.1374332} }- Heechan Park
Abhir Bhalerao
Graham Martin
Andy C. Yu
Year: 2006
An affine symmetric approach to natural image compression
MOBIMEDIA
ACM
DOI: 10.1145/1374296.1374332
Abstract
We approach image compression using an affine symmetric image representation that exploits rotation and scaling as well as the translational redundancy present between image blocks. It resembles fractal theory in the sense that a single prototypical block is needed to represent other similar blocks. Finding the optimal prototypes is not a trivial task particularly for a natural image. We propose an efficient technique utilizing independent component analysis that results in near-optimal prototypical blocks. A reliable affine model estimation method based on Gaussian mixture models and modified expectation maximization is presented. For completeness, a parameter entropy coding strategy is suggested that achieves as low as 0.14 bpp. This study provides an interesting approach to image compression although the reconstruction quality is slightly below that of some other methods. However the high frequency details are well-preserved at low bitrates, making the technique potentially useful in low bandwidth mobile applications.