A perceptually lossless, model-based, texture compression technique

In natural scenes, still images as well as sequences, backgrounds, and objects' surfaces usually have a textural structure. Therefore, in order to efficiently code images it is crucial to investigate the texture compression problem. In this paper, a perceptually lossless, synthesis-by-analysis texture coding method is presented. The proposed approach is model based; the parameters of the model consist of a binary excitation signal and the parsimonious representation of the reconstruction filter. The estimated parameters, which allow to synthesize, at the decoder site, a texture that is perceptually indistinguishable from the original one, are then compressed using a lossless strategy, which is based on a fast binary wavelet transformation specifically tailored to binary images. The proposed method leads to very good perceptual results superior to those of existing techniques.