Fractal image compression with region-based functionality

Region-based functionality offered by the MPEG-4 video compression standard is also appealing for still images, for example to permit object-based queries of a still-image database. A popular method for still-image compression is fractal coding. However, traditional fractal image coding uses rectangular range and domain blocks. Although new schemes have been proposed that merge small blocks into irregular shapes, the merging process does not, in general, produce semantically-meaningful regions. We propose a new approach to fractal image coding that permits region-based functionalities; images are coded region by region according to a previously-computed segmentation map. We use rectangular range and domain blocks, but divide boundary blocks into segments belonging to different regions. Since this prevents the use of standard dissimilarity measure, we propose a new measure adapted to segment shape. We propose two approaches: one in the spatial and one in the transform domain. While prov...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: TIP
• Authors: Kamel Belloulata, Janusz Konrad
• Keywords: Fractal Image, Images, Still-image Database, TIP 2002