Gray-level-embedded lossless image compression

Abstract

A level-embedded lossless compression method for continuous-tone still images is presented. Level (bit-plane) scalability is achieved by separating the image into two layers before compression and excellent compression performance is obtained by exploiting both spatial and inter-level correlations. A comparison of the proposed scheme with a number of scalable and non-scalable lossless image compression algorithms is performed to benchmark its performance. The results indicate that the level-embedded compression incurs only a small penalty in compression efficiency over non-scalable lossless compression, while offering the significant benefit of level-scalability.