A new approach for optical colored image compression using the JPEG standards

Image compression consists in reducing information volume representing an image. Elimination of redundancies and non-pertinent information enables memory space minimization and thus faster data transmission. The present work aims to improve the quality of the compressed image while minimizing the time required for compression by using the principle of coherent optics. We present an optical adaptation of the method of JPEG compression technique for binary, gray-level and color images. Illustrative simulations will be given at the end to validate our architecture and to evaluate the performance on different types of images (binary, gray and color). An optical implementation setup is proposed and validated experimentally. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.