Soft Compression: An Approach to Shape Coding for Images

Abstract

In this letter, we propose soft compression, an lossless compression approach to shape coding for images using location index and codebook of designed shapes with various sizes. This method is different from traditional image compression methods, as it aims at finding the basic shape blocks of pictures to improve the compression ratio from the perspective of information theory and frequency. In particular, the triplets including location and codeword are stored when encoding an image instead of the entire array. It is shown that soft compression can greatly reduce the bandwidth and storage space needed in the process of transmitting and storing the same kind of images.