Reversible denoising and lifting based color component transformation for lossless image compression

An undesirable side effect of reversible color space transformation, which consists of lifting steps (LSs), is that while removing correlation it contaminates transformed components with noise from other components. Noise affects particularly adversely the compression ratios of lossless compression algorithms. To remove correlation without increasing noise, a reversible denoising and lifting step (RDLS) was proposed that integrates denoising filters into LS. Applying RDLS to color space transformation results in a new image component transformation that is perfectly reversible despite involving the inherently irreversible denoising; the first application of such a transformation is presented in this paper. For the JPEG-LS, JPEG 2000, and JPEG XR standard algorithms in lossless mode, the application of RDLS to the RDgDb color space transformation with simple denoising filters is especially effective for images in the native optical resolution of acquisition devices. It results in improving compression ratios of all those images in cases when unmodified color space transformation either improves or worsens ratios compared with the untransformed image. The average improvement is 5.0–6.0% for two out of the three sets of such images, whereas average ratios of images from standard test-sets are improved by up to 2.2%. For the efficient image-adaptive determination of filters for RDLS, a couple of fast entropy-based estimators of compression effects that may be used independently of the actual compression algorithm are investigated and an immediate filter selection method based on the detector precision characteristic model driven by image acquisition parameters is introduced.

Reduction of Artefacts in JPEG-XR Compressed Images

The JPEG-XR encoding process utilizes two types of transform operations: Photo Overlap Transform (POT) and Photo Core Transform (PCT). Using the Device Porting Kit (DPK) provided by Microsoft, we performed encoding and decoding processes on JPEG XR images. It was discovered that when the quantization parameter is >1-lossy compression conditions, the resulting image displays chequerboard block artefacts, border artefacts and corner artefacts. These artefacts are due to the nonlinearity of transforms used by JPEG-XR. Typically, it is not so visible; however, it can cause problems while copying and scanning applications, as it shows nonlinear transforms when the source and the target of the image have different configurations. Hence, it is important for document image processing pipelines to take such artefacts into account. Additionally, these artefacts are most problematic for high-quality settings and appear more visible at high compression ratios. In this paper, we analyse the cause of the above artefacts. It was found that the main problem lies in the step of POT and quantization. To solve this problem, the use of a “uniform matrix” is proposed. After POT (encoding) and before inverse POT (decoding), an extra step is added to multiply this uniform matrix. Results suggest that it is an easy and effective way to decrease chequerboard, border and corner artefacts, thereby improving the image quality of lossy encoding JPEG XR than the original DPK program with no increased calculation complexity or file size.