Image Compression Techniques: An Introduction

Yumnam Kirani Singh

Reseach Co-ordinator,
Department of Electronics and Telecommunication
Shri Shankaracharya College of Engineering and Technology
Junwani Bhilai

Introduction
In today’s digital world, when we see digital movie, listen digital music, read digital mail,
store documents digitally, making conversation digitally, we have to deal with huge
amount of digital data. So, data compression plays a very significant role to keep the
digital world realistic. If there were no data compression techniques, we would have not
been able to listen songs over the Internet, see digital pictures or movies, Or we would
have not heard about video conferencing or telemedicine. How data compression made it
possible? What are the main advantages of data compression in digital world? There may
be many answers but the three obvious reasons are the saving of memory space for
storage, channel bandwidth and the processing time for transmission. Every one of us
might have experienced that before the advent MP3, hardly 4 or 5 songs of wav file could
be accommodated. And it was not possible to send a wav file through mail because of its
tremendous file size. Also, it took 5 to 10 minutes or even more to download a song from
the Internet. Now, we can easily accommodate 50 to 60 songs of MP3 in a music CD of
same capacity. Because, the uncompressed audio files can be compressed 10 to 15 times
using MP3 format. And we have no problem in sending any of our favorite music to our
distant friends in any corner of the world. Also, we can download a song in MP3 in a
matter of seconds. This is a simple example of significance of data compression. Similar
compression schemes were developed for other digital data like images and videos.
Videos are nothings but the animations of frames of images in a proper sequence at a rate
of 30 frames per second or higher. A huge amount of memory is required for storing
video files. The possibility of storing 4/5 movies in DVD CD now rather than we used
2/3 CDs for a movie file is because compression. We will consider here mainly the image
compression techniques.

Why do we use JPEG and GIF in the Internet?

Everyone who surfs the Internet might have quite familiar with the term JPEG (Joint
Expert Photography Group) [13] image format and GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
file format. There are several other image file formats, but these two are accepted as
standard and are supported by most of the Internet Browsers. These two formats are
different and used for different image sizes. GIF is mainly used for smaller images, such
as Icon, thumbnail, etc. And JPEG is used for larger image files. JPEG compressed more
while its image quality is poor. GIF compresses less but its image quality is high. If the
smaller image files, like icons or Thumbnails, etc are compressed by using JPEG, the
icon or thumbnail may be indistinguishably blurred. And if large image file is
compressed using GIF, the file size will still be large and it would take more time to
download the image to open a web page. And one has to wait idly around half an hour or
so to see a web page containing image of size approximately 5 inch by 5 inch. That will
be a horrible experience and would loss patience of the surfer sometimes. That is why, we
used JPEG file for compressing large file. It can compress and image 8 to 16 times
without introducing much visually distinguishable artifacts in the image. However, if we
compress more than 16 times, it starts introducing blocky artifacts in the image.
Sometimes, you might have seen such blocky artifacts when you see a web page
containing a very large image file that occupies full screen or much beyond the screen
size. The image quality depends on the amount of the compression. If we compressed
more, the quality of the image degrades more. So, while performing image compression,
we have to keep in mind the acceptable quality of the target image. But there is no
degradation in the image quality for GIF images. Why? In GIF image file format, the
image data are losslessly compressed. Whereas in the case of JPEG mentioned above, the
image data are lossily compressed. So there are two main types of compression
techniques: Lossless compression and Lossy Compression. It is in the area of lossy
compression where researchers put their efforts to evolve newer compression techniques.
Research in lossless compression is almost stagnant now. This does not mean that
lossless compression technique lose their grip in data compression. It is the indispensable
part of text, the sensitive data compression and is being used as the last stage in most of
the lossy compression schemes to achieve more compression.

Lossless and Lossy Compression

Every compression scheme aims at the removal of data redundancy to represent the data
in a more efficient and compact way. The type of redundancy may be different for
different types of data. For a text data, the most common form of redundancy is the
codeword redundancy where a code for certain symbols or words occur more frequently
than others. If we can assign smaller codes for more frequently symbols or words, then
we can get compression. Huffman coding, Arithmetic coding, LZW (Lampel Ziv Welch)
coding, etc [8] aim at reducing coding redundancy. The next is the inter-element or inter
pixel redundancy, also commonly known as spatial redundancy. This type of data
redundancy mainly occurs in audio and image data. Predictive coding, differential coding
and transform coding aim at the reduction of this type of redundancy. There are two more
types of data redundancy called psychovisual redundancy and temporal redundancy.
Psychovisual redundancy, also known as spectral redundancy refers to the occurrence of
insignificant frequencies of speech or image. Removal of such types of data introduces
hardly discernible distortion to our ears or eyes. The temporal redundancy occurs mainly
for video data, which refers to the interframe data redundancy of a video signal. Any
compression scheme while trying to reduce the redundancy occurred in a data may or
may not lead to the loss of some information. Any compression scheme, which reduces
the data redundancy without causing any loss of information is called lossless
compression scheme.

How do we compare between compression algorithms?

There are various ways to compare between two compression algorithms. The parameters
are different for lossless and lossy compression schemes. For lossless compression
scheme, the first parameter we compare is their compression ratios. Then, we check the
time complexity and the memory requirements. Any lossless compression scheme, which
yields higher compression ratio, lesser time complexity and requires lesser memory, is
accepted to be a better lossless compression algorithm. For lossy compression, we also
compare the quality of the decompressed image. The quality of the decompressed image
is measured in terms of PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) value. The decompressed
image having the higher PSNR value is assumed to have retained better image quality of
the original image. It is inversely proportional to the mean square error (MSE). The more
the error, the less will be the PSNR value and vice versa. PSNR value is infinite for
lossless image compression because the MSE value is zero in lossless compression.
Hence, any lossy compression scheme, which gives more PSNR value and more
compression ratio, is accepted to be the better compression algorithm.

Why wavelet image compression?

We know that lossy JPEG compression introduces blocky artifacts in the decompressed
image, which are not desirable and pleasing to the eyes. Lapped Orthogonal Transforms
(LOT) [7] was proposed to solve this problem by using smoothing the overlapping
blocks. LOT could reduce the blocking effects but its computational complexity is very
high and hence LOT is not preferred to use over JPEG. On the other hand, wavelet based
image compression introduces no blocky artifacts in the decompressed image. The
decompressed image is much smoother and pleasant to eyes. Also, we can achieve much
higher compression ratios much regardless of the amount of compression achieved.
Another interesting feature of wavelet is that we can improve the quality of the image
more and more and by adding more and more detail information. This feature is attractive
for what is known as progressive transmission of images. Another lossy compression
scheme developed for image compression is the fractal base image compression scheme
[1]. However the fractal based image compression beginning to loss ground because it is
very complex and time consuming. Moreover, the achievable compression ratio is not
high enough as can be achieved by using wavelet. Wavelet can also be used for lossless
image compression as well. This is possible by the use of what is known as integer
wavelet transforms.

How wavelet image compression works?

Wavelet signifies small wave. It was first used in approximating a function by linear
combination of various waveforms obtained by translating and scaling the wavelet at
various position and scales. It was very old from the time of Alfred Haars. But it was not
so popular then because it found no application area. It becomes popular only when
Ingrid Daubechies [5] shows that QMF (Quadrature Mirror Filter) filters [6] used in
filterbank for subband coding can be generated from the wavelet by using the perfect
reconstruction relation of the filter bank. So, what we obtain from the wavelet is a set of
QMF filter banks that can be used for subband coding. In a QMF filter bank a signal is
first decomposed into low pass and high pass components using low filters. The filter
components are reduced their size by half either by rejecting the even or odd samples
thereby the total size of the original signal is preserved. The low pass filter component
retains almost all distinguishable features of the original signal. And the high pass filter
component has little or no resemblance of the original signal. The low pass component is
again decomposed into two components. The decomposition process can be continued up
to the last possible level or up to a certain desired level. As the high pass filter
components have less information discernible to the original signal, we can eliminate the
information contents of the high pass filters partially or significantly at each level of
decomposition during the reconstruction process. It is this possibility of elimination of
the information contents of the high pass filter components that gives higher compression
ratio in the case of wavelet based image compression. Simple decomposition and
reconstruction by eliminating less informative parts of the high pass filter components
may not always lead to the compression. For we have to use certain coding scheme to get
higher compression ratios. Some of the most cited coding algorithms for wavelet based
image compression are EZW (Embedded Zerotree Wavelet) [10], SPIHT (Set Partitioning
in Hierarchical Tree) [9] and EBCOT (Embedded Block Coding with Optimal
Truncation) [11]. EZW is now longer popular as it has been improved to SPIHT. Now
SPIHT and EBCOT are the two main contenders for wavelet based image coding. JPEG
group has accepted EBCOT as their wavelet based coding scheme to upgrade their JPEG
to JPEG2000 version to achieve higher compression ratio and less distortion in the
decompressed signal. So, now the main contender is between SPIHT and JPEG2000. In
any wavelet based image compression scheme, the achievable compression ratio is not
only dependent on the efficiency of the coding scheme, it is also dependent on the choice
of appropriate wavelet filters. Different filters give different compression ratios for the
same image and coding scheme [4]. There are numerous wavelet filters. It is our task to
choice appropriate filters for our compression scheme. For JPEG2000, they used 9/7
biothogonal wavelet filters for lossy image compression and 5/3 for lossless image
compression. For SPIHT coding scheme, usually 9/7 biorthogonal filters is used for lossy
image compression and S+P transform filters for lossless image compression. However,
9/7 is not the optimal filters for lossy image compression, still lot of research is going on
about the finding of optimal filters for lossy image compression for different image types
[14].

Wavelet based image compression Example

Just to show how wavelet based image compression is performed, a simple image
compression example to given here. Fig-1a, is the original image. It is decomposed up to
two levels using 9/7 biorthogonal filters. There are one low pass components and six high
pass components. The low pass component is also most often referred to as
approximation component as it basically represents the approximation of the original
signal or image. The high pass components are often referred to as details. So, in figure-
1b, the top leftmost corner, the rest are the details. We see that the approximation
component represents fairly represent the original signal even it is four times reduced in
size. Figure-1c gives the decompressed image from the 16 times compressed data. And
figure 1-d shows the decompressed image from the 32 times compressed data. However,
we see that these decompressed image are visually similar to the original image.
However, they are very different numerically. This is how the lossy compression works.
Using wavelet based image compression we can compress an image up to 128 times, still
we would get distinguishable approximation of the image.
 (a) (b)
Fig. 6(a) Original Image, and (b) Spectral decomposition and ordering.

.
(c) (d)
Fig. 6(c) Compressed image at 16:1, and (d) compressed image at 32:1

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