Lossy Compression Algorithms

The lossless compression algorithms like Huffman coding, dictionary based coding, arithmetic coding etc are mainly used to compress text When it comes to a huge data arrangement like images, speech, video etc., these algorithms fail to provide sufficient compression in the data The term Lossy indicates that there is a loss of information (mostly intentional) while encoding the data, which is mostly unnoticeable by the human eyes

Distortion Measure
A distortion measure is a mathematical quantity that specifies how close is an approximation to its original, using some distortion criteria Difference between original and approximated data? In Images Perceptual distortion is important and not the numerical distortion

Numerical distortion measures

Mean Squared Error 2 = (1/N) n=1N (xn - yn)2
(Average Pixel Difference)

Signal to Noise Ratio SNR = 10 log (x2 / 2)

(Size of error w.r.t the Input signal)

Peak Signal to Noise Ratio PSNR = 10 log (xpeak2 / 2)

(Size of error w.r.t peak value of input signal)

Rate Distortion theory

Lossy compression = Trade off between Rate and Distortion R specifies the rate for given distortion When D = 0, the bit rate is maximum and follows lossless compression

Quantization A Basic Lossy scheme

Depending on whether the input is scalar or vector, we have Scalar Quantization (SQ) and Vector Quantization (VQ) When input source is uniformly distributed, an Uniform Quantizer (UQ) can be used

Non Uniform SQ
Here smaller step size is used where the signal occurs predominantly and enlarged step size is used where signal sparsely occurs Two common approaches
Lloyd Max Quantizer Companding

Lloyd-Max Quantizer
Begin Choose initial level set (y0,y1) i = 0; Repeat Compute bi using its equation i=i+1 Compute yi using its equation Untill |yi yi-1| < End

Companding
In companded qunatization, input is mapped by compressor function C(x) Then it is quantized by an uniform quantizer After Transmission the quantized values are mapped back using an expander function C-1(x)

Vector Quantization
Encoding of frequently occurring words in English like the or and etc. provide better compression than encoding each letters t h e a o etc The same concept can be extended to speech, images as segments in speech or a collection of pixels in image and these groups of samples are called as VECTORS

Vector Quantization
A compression system performs better if it is operated in a group of vectors (collection of data) VQ is same as SQ but extended to multiple dimensions In VQ an n-component code vector represents vectors that lie within a region in n dimensional vector space. A collection of these code vectors form the codebook for the vector quantizer

Basic VQ procedure

Transform Coding
In case of data like speech and images, the different bit encoding should not be done to highly correlated samples. But however, majority of the samples are correlated to each other! Eg in text : THINK and THING, THROUGH and THOUGH, MIGHT and FIGHT Transform coding helps in removal of these correlation, so that effective encoding can be done

Transform Coding
Let X =[x1,x2,x3..xk]T be vector of samples X -> T{x} -> Y -> T-1{x} -> X Y is the resultant of linear transformation of X and vector Ys elements are made less correlated, so that the encoding is done better Less correlated = More Othogonal Transform T itself doesnt compress the data, it helps the compression algorithm to perform better (Better compression ratio)

Discrete Cosine Transform

Definition (DFT?) In Fourier Analysis, any signal can be represented in terms of its Sine and Cosine components at various amplitudes and freqeucies For instance if we take the signal as an electrical signal, the process of determining the amplitudes of AC and DC components of the signal is called as Cosine Transform and in particular if the indices are integers, it is called as DCT From definition if u=0, it gives the DC component and when u=1,2 it gives the first, second AC components The IDCT is reconstruction of original signal from these DC and AC components

DCT (Continued)
For the 1D DCT defined, there will be a set of 8 different basis functions and their coefficent matrix is as shown

Characteristics of DCT
DCT produces frequency spectrum F(u) corresponding to the spatial signal f(i) The first coefficient is the DC component of the signal, which gives the average magnitude of the signal The other seven AC components (basis functions) have characteristics like the first component completes half cycle, second completes one cycle, third completes one and half seventh completes three and half cycles DCT coefficients can also take negative values (For image DC component is always positive) DCT is a linear Transformation DCT (pA + qB) = p DCT(A) + q DCT(B)

Two Dimensional 8x8 DCT

Comparision between DCT and DFT

The DFT coefficients will be exponential values By using Eulers formula, eix = cos x + isin x We can guess that DCT is likely a transform that forms the real part of DFT