Lossless compression-based progressive image transmission scheme

Abstract

The lossless compression of images is widely used in medical imaging and remote sensing applications. Also, progressive transmission of images is often desirable because it can reduce the transmission bits of an image. Therefore, combining the features of lossless compression and progressive transmission of images has been intensely researched. The bitplane method (BPM) is the simplest way to implement a lossless progressive image transmission system. In the present paper, a new block-based scheme for lossless progressive image transmission is proposed. This scheme will reduce the transmission load and improve the image quality of BPM. This method first performs a quantization operation upon the blocks of an image. Next, these blocks are encoded with fewer bits, and the bits are then transmitted phase by phase. The experimental results show that the image quality of this method is better than those in the BPM and improved BPM in related traditional works under the same transmission load. Moreover, during the first phase, the difference in peak signal-to-noise ratio between the present method and BPM is exactly equal up to 8.85 dB. This method is therefore effective for lossless progressive image transmission.