An Adaptive Algorithm for Improving the Fractal Image Compression (FIC)

Abstract

In this paper an adaptive algorithm is proposed to reduce the long time that has been taken in the Fractal Image Compression (FIC) technique. This algorithm worked on reducing the number of matching operations between range and domain blocks by reducing both of the range and domain blocks needed in the matching process, for this purpose, two techniques have been proposed; the first one is called Range Exclusion ( RE ), in this technique variance factor is used to reduce the number of range blocks by excluding ranges of the homogenous or flat regions from the matching process; the second technique is called Reducing the Domain Image Size ( RDIZ ), it is responsible for the reduction of the domain by minimizing the Domain Image Size to 1/16 th instead of 1/4 th of the original image size used in the traditional FIC. This in turn will affect the encoding time, compression ratio and the reconstructed image quality. For getting best results, the two techniques are coupled in one algorithm; the new algorithm is called ( RD-RE ). The tested (256x256) gray images are partitioned into fixed (4x4) blocks and then compressed using visual C++ 6.0 code. The results show that RE technique is faster and gets more compression ratio than the traditional FIC and keeping a high reconstructed images quality while RD-RE is faster and it gets higher compression ratio than RE but with slight loss in the reconstructed image quality.