<title>Bit allocation considering mean absolute error for image compression</title>

Abstract

In lossy image compression schemes, often some distortion measure is minimized to arrive at a desired target bit rate. The distortion measure that has been most studied is the mean-squared-error (MSE). However, perceptual quality often does not agree with the notion of minimization of mean square error1 . Since MSE can not guarantee the optimality of perceptual quality, others error measures have been investigated. Others have found strong mathematical and practical perspective to choose a different error measure other than MSE, especially for image compression2. In Ref. 2 it is argued that the mean absolute error (MAE) measure is a better error measure than MSE for image compression from a perceptual standpoint. In addition, the MSE measure fails when only a small proportion of extreme observations is present3. In this paper we develop a bit allocation algorithm to minimize the MAE rather than MSE