Low Complexity Lossless Compression Research Articles

Memory-Efficient Fixed-Length Representation of Synchronous Event Frames for Very-Low-Power Chip Integration

The new event cameras are now widely used in many computer vision applications. Their high raw data bitrate levels require a more efficient fixed-length representation for low-bandwidth transmission from the event sensor to the processing chip. A novel low-complexity lossless compression framework is proposed for encoding the synchronous event frames (EFs) by introducing a novel memory-efficient fixed-length representation suitable for hardware implementation in the very-low-power (VLP) event-processing chip. A first contribution proposes an improved representation of the ternary frames using pixel-group frame partitioning and symbol remapping. Another contribution proposes a novel low-complexity memory-efficient fixed-length representation using multi-level lookup tables (LUTs). Complex experimental analysis is performed using a set of group-size configurations. For very-large group-size configurations, an improved representation is proposed using a mask-LUT structure. The experimental evaluation on a public dataset demonstrates that the proposed fixed-length coding framework provides at least two times the compression ratio relative to the raw EF representation and a close performance compared with variable-length video coding standards and variable-length state-of-the-art image codecs for lossless compression of ternary EFs generated at frequencies bellow one KHz. To our knowledge, the paper is the first to introduce a low-complexity memory-efficient fixed-length representation for lossless compression of synchronous EFs, suitable for integration into a VLP event-processing chip.

Low-Complexity Lossless Coding of Asynchronous Event Sequences for Low-Power Chip Integration.

The event sensor provides high temporal resolution and generates large amounts of raw event data. Efficient low-complexity coding solutions are required for integration into low-power event-processing chips with limited memory. In this paper, a novel lossless compression method is proposed for encoding the event data represented as asynchronous event sequences. The proposed method employs only low-complexity coding techniques so that it is suitable for hardware implementation into low-power event-processing chips. A first, novel, contribution consists of a low-complexity coding scheme which uses a decision tree to reduce the representation range of the residual error. The decision tree is formed by using a triplet threshold parameter which divides the input data range into several coding ranges arranged at concentric distances from an initial prediction, so that the residual error of the true value information is represented by using a reduced number of bits. Another novel contribution consists of an improved representation, which divides the input sequence into same-timestamp subsequences, wherein each subsequence collects the same timestamp events in ascending order of the largest dimension of the event spatial information. The proposed same-timestamp representation replaces the event timestamp information with the same-timestamp subsequence length and encodes it together with the event spatial and polarity information into a different bitstream. Another novel contribution is the random access to any time window by using additional header information. The experimental evaluation on a highly variable event density dataset demonstrates that the proposed low-complexity lossless coding method provides an average improvement of 5.49%, 11.45%, and 35.57% compared with the state-of-the-art performance-oriented lossless data compression codecs Bzip2, LZMA, and ZLIB, respectively. To our knowledge, the paper proposes the first low-complexity lossless compression method for encoding asynchronous event sequences that are suitable for hardware implementation into low-power chips.

A Universal Low Complexity Compression Algorithm for Sparse Marked Graphs

Many modern applications involve accessing and processing graphical data, i.e. data that is naturally indexed by graphs. Examples come from internet graphs, social networks, genomics and proteomics, and other sources. The typically large size of such data motivates seeking efficient ways for its compression and decompression. The current compression methods are usually tailored to specific models, or do not provide theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we introduce a low-complexity lossless compression algorithm for sparse marked graphs, i.e. graphical data indexed by sparse graphs, which is capable of universally achieving the optimal compression rate defined on a per-node basis. The time and memory complexities of our compression and decompression algorithms are optimal within logarithmic factors. In order to define universality we employ the framework of local weak convergence, which allows one to make sense of a notion of stochastic processes for sparse graphs. Moreover, we investigate the performance of our algorithm through some experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data.

An FPGA-Based LOCO-ANS Implementation for Lossless and Near-Lossless Image Compression Using High-Level Synthesis

In this work, we present and evaluate a hardware architecture for the LOCO-ANS (Low Complexity Lossless Compression with Asymmetric Numeral Systems) lossless and near-lossless image compressor, which is based on JPEG-LS standard. The design is implemented in two FPGA generations, evaluating its performance for different codec configurations. The tests show that the design is capable of up to 40.5 MPixels/s and 124 MPixels/s per lane for Zynq 7020 and UltraScale+ FPGAs, respectively. Compared to the single thread LOCO-ANS software implementation running in a 1.2 GHz Raspberry Pi 3B, each hardware lane achieves 6.5 times higher throughput, even when implemented in an older and cost-optimized chip like the Zynq 7020. Results are also presented for a lossless only version, which achieves a lower footprint and approximately 50% higher performance than the version that supports both lossless and near-lossless. Interestingly, these great results were obtained applying High-Level Synthesis, describing the coder with C++ code, which tends to establish a trade-off between design time and quality of results. These results show that the algorithm is very suitable for hardware implementation. Moreover, the implemented system is faster and achieves higher compression than the best previously available near-lossless JPEG-LS hardware implementation.

A Novel Lossless ECG Compression Algorithm for Active Implants.

A low complexity lossless ECG compression algorithm for active implants is proposed in this paper. The algorithm is based on adaptive length encoding by combining linear prediction with delta encoding. The algorithm is tested on forty-eight segments of 30-min ECG signals obtained from MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. The results show that with the data segment length of 33 and the predictor order of 2, the average compression rate of the algorithm reaches 2.43 and there is no difference between the reconstructed signal and the original one. It implies that it can realize the lossless compression with a high compression ratio. Meanwhile, the low complexity makes this novel algorithm suitable for ECG monitoring applications of active implants.

Predictor Based Block Adaptive Near-Lossless Coding Technique for Magnetic Resonance Image Sequence

In today’s world of information exchange, digital imaging of pathological information has grown very fast and hence plays an essential role in disease diagnosis. Radiological modalities such as Computed Tomography (CT) scanners, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), X-Ray are increasing massively. The demand for handling images in digital form has increased dramatically in recent years for efficient archiving and transmission that raises the need of efficient compression. In this paper, a near-lossless predictive based coding technique is proposed that address the low coding efficiency of lossless coding and low image quality of lossy coding. The proposed technique removes inter-pixel redundancy and physco-visual redundancy by employing Resolution Independent Gradient Edge Detector (RIGED) at optimal threshold value and optimal q-level for quantization respectively. Coding redundancy is removed by employing block based encoding at optimal fixed size block. Volumetric MR image datasets of 8 bit and 16 bit are utilized for implementation of the proposed technique. The proposed technique is compared with the state-of-the art techniques and outperforms Context Adaptive Lossless Image Compression (CALIC), Low Complexity Lossless Compression for Images (LOCO-I) and Differential Pulse Code Modulation (DPCM) with context switching NN predictor by 34.33%, 39.80% and 30.35% respectively.

Implementation of LOCO-I Lossless Image Compression Algorithm for Deep Space Applications

<p>Present emerging trend in space science applications is to explore and utilize the deep space. Image coding in deep space communications play vital role in deep space missions. Lossless image compression has been recommended for space science exploration missions to retain the quality of image. On-board memory and bandwidth requirement is reduced by image compression. Programmable logic like field programmable gate array (FPGA) offers an attractive solution for performance and flexibility required by real time image compression algorithms. The powerful feature of FPGA is parallel processing which allows the data to process quicker than microprocessor implementation. This paper elaborates on implementing low complexity lossless image compression algorithm coder on FPGA with minimum utilization of onboard resources for deep space applications.</p>

An ECG-on-Chip With 535 nW/Channel Integrated Lossless Data Compressor for Wireless Sensors

This paper presents a low-power ECG recording system-on-chip (SoC) with on-chip low-complexity lossless ECG compression for data reduction in wireless/ambulatory ECG sensor devices. The chip uses a linear slope predictor for data compression, and incorporates a novel low-complexity dynamic coding-packaging scheme to frame the prediction error into fixed-length 16-bit format. The proposed technique achieves an average compression ratio of 2.25x on MIT/BIH ECG database. Implemented in a standard 0.35 um process, the compressor uses 0.565K gates/channel occupying 0.4 mm2 for four channels, and consumes 535 nW/channel at 2.4 V for ECG sampled at 512 Hz. Small size and ultra-low power consumption makes the proposed technique suitable for wearable ECG sensor applications.

Implementation of LOCO-I Lossless Image Compression Algorithm for Deep Space Applications

<p>Present emerging trend in space science applications is to explore and utilize the deep space. Image coding in deep space communications play vital role in deep space missions. Lossless image compression has been recommended for space science exploration missions to retain the quality of image. On-board memory and bandwidth requirement is reduced by image compression. Programmable logic like field programmable gate array (FPGA) offers an attractive solution for performance and flexibility required by real time image compression algorithms. The powerful feature of FPGA is parallel processing which allows the data to process quicker than microprocessor implementation. This paper elaborates on implementing low complexity lossless image compression algorithm coder on FPGA with minimum utilization of onboard resources for deep space applications.</p>

Low complexity lossless compression of underwater sound recordings

Autonomous listening devices are increasingly used to study vocal aquatic animals, and there is a constant need to record longer or with greater bandwidth, requiring efficient use of memory and battery power. Real-time compression of sound has the potential to extend recording durations and bandwidths at the expense of increased processing operations and therefore power consumption. Whereas lossy methods such as MP3 introduce undesirable artifacts, lossless compression algorithms (e.g., flac) guarantee exact data recovery. But these algorithms are relatively complex due to the wide variety of signals they are designed to compress. A simpler lossless algorithm is shown here to provide compression factors of three or more for underwater sound recordings over a range of noise environments. The compressor was evaluated using samples from drifting and animal-borne sound recorders with sampling rates of 16-240 kHz. It achieves >87% of the compression of more-complex methods but requires about 1/10 of the processing operations resulting in less than 1 mW power consumption at a sampling rate of 192 kHz on a low-power microprocessor. The potential to triple recording duration with a minor increase in power consumption and no loss in sound quality may be especially valuable for battery-limited tags and robotic vehicles.

웨이블릿 변환의 메모리 크기와 대역폭 감소를 위한 Prediction 기반의 Embedded Compression 알고리즘

본 논문에서는 JPEG2000 부호화 시스템의 과도한 메모리 요구 사항을 감소시키기 위해 예측 부호화 기반의 새로운 임베디드 압축(Embedded Compression, EC) 알고리즘을 제안한다. 본 논문의 EC 기법은 EC가 적용되지 않은 DWT 프로세서와 비교하여 DWT 과정에서 발생하는 임시적인 저주파 웨이블릿 계수들의 메모리 접근 및 크기를 50 %로 줄일 수 있다. 무손실의 영상 압축 시스템에 널리 쓰이면서 단순하지만 좋은 성능을 갖는 LOCO-I(LOw COmplexity LOssless COmpression for Image)와 MAP(Median Adaptive Predictor) 예측기를 제안한 EC 알고리즘에 적용하였다. 제안한 예측 기반의 EC 알고리즘은 예측 오차 값들을 인코딩하기 위하여 포워드 적응형 양자화와 고정 길이 코드를 사용한다. 시뮬레이션 결과를 통해 예측기가 LOCO-I와 MAP인 경우, 본 논문에서 제안한 EC 알고리즘에 의한 평균적인 PSNR 저하는 각각 0.48 dB와 0.26 dB임을 알 수 있다. 선행 논문 [9]에서 제안한 하다마드 변환(MHT) 기반의 EC 알고리즘과 비교하여 평균적인 PSNR이 약 1.39 dB 향상된다. In this paper, a new prediction based embedded compression (EC) codec algorithm for the JPEG2000 encoder system is proposed to reduce excessive memory requirements. The EC technique can reduce the 50 % memory requirement for intermediate low-frequency coefficients during multiple discrete wavelet transform (DWT) stages compared with direct implementation of the DWT engine of this paper. The LOCO-I predictor and MAP are widely used in many lossless picture compression codec. The proposed EC algorithm use these predictor which are very simple but surprisingly effective. The predictive EC scheme adopts a forward adaptive quantization and fixed length coding to encoding the prediction error. Simulation results show that our LOCO-I and MAP based EC codecs present only PSNR degradation of 0.48 and 0.26 dB in average, respectively. The proposed algorithm improves the average PSNR by 1.39 dB compared to the previous work in [9].

Scalability and Communication in Parallel Low-Complexity Lossless Compression

Approximation schemes for optimal compression with static and sliding dictionaries which can run on a simple array of processors with distributed memory and no interconnections are presented. These approximation algorithms can be implemented on both small and large scale parallel systems. The sliding dictionary method requires large size files on large scale systems. As far as lossless image compression is concerned, arithmetic encoders enable the best lossless compressors but they are often ruled out because they are too complex. Storer extended dictionary text compression to bi-level images to avoid arithmetic encoders (BLOCK MATCHING). We were able to partition an image into up to a hundred areas and to apply the BLOCK MATCHING heuristic independently to each area with no loss of compression effectiveness. Therefore, the approach is suitable for a small scale parallel system at no communication cost. On the other hand, bi-level image compression seems to require communication on large scale systems. With regard to grey scale and color images, parallelizable lossless image compression (PALIC) is a highly parallelizable and scalable lossless compressor since it is applied independently to blocks of 8 × 8 pixels. We experimented the BLOCK MATCHING and PALIC heuristics with up to 32 processors of a 256 Intel Xeon 3.06 GHz processors machine (http://avogadro.cilea.it) on a test set of large topographic bi-level images and color images in RGB format. We obtained the expected speed-up of the compression and decompression times, achieving parallel running times about 25 times faster than the sequential ones. Finally, scalable algorithms computing static and sliding dictionary optimal text compression on an exclusive read, exclusive write shared memory parallel machine are presented. On the same model, compression by block matching of bi-level images is shown which can be implemented on a full binary tree architecture under some realistic assumptions with no scalability issues.

Lossless image compression using adjustable fractional line-buffer

Video frame memory compression has gained increased popularity in video processing ICs to save external memory storage size and reduce memory access bandwidth. This technique is especially important in portable devices where efficient use of energy is critical for the deployment of video applications. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity lossless image compression method that uses only a fraction of one line-buffer. The proposed method first employs integer wavelet transform (IWT), and then low-frequency coefficients prediction of each segment based on those from the segment in the line above, and last Golomb-Rice (GR) encoding to achieve low-cost and highly efficient compression. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method gives a compression ratio comparable with the existing state-of-the-art low-complexity methods while significantly lowering the internal memory cost and keeping the complexity low.

An Enhanced Short Text Compression Scheme for Smart Devices

Short Text Compression is a great concern for data engineering and management. The rapid use of small devices especially, mobile phones and wireless sensors have turned short text compression into a demand-of-thetime. In this paper, we propose an approach of compressing short English text for smart devices. The prime objective of this proposed technique is to establish a low-complexity lossless compression scheme suitable for smart devices like cellular phones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) having small memory and relatively low processing speed. The main target is to compress short messages up to an optimal level, which requires optimal space, consumes less time and low overhead. Here a new static-statistical context model has been proposed to obtain the compression. We use character masking with space integration, syllable based dictionary matching and static coding in hierarchical steps to achieve low complexity lossless compression of short English text for low-powered electronic devices. We also propose an efficient probabilistic distribution based content-ranking scheme for training the statistical model. We analyze the performance of the proposed scheme as well as the other similar existing schemes with respect to compression ratio, computational complexity and compression-decompression time. The analysis shows that, the required number of operations for the proposed scheme is less than that of other existing systems. The experimental results of the implemented model give better compression for small text files using optimum resources. The obtained compression ratio indicates a satisfactory performance in terms of compression parameters including better compression ratio, lower compression and decompression time with reduced memory requirements and lower complexity. The compression time is also lower because of computational simplicity. In overall analysis, the simplicity of computational requirement encompasses the compression effective and efficient.

Low-complexity lossless compression of hyperspectral imagery via linear prediction

We present a new low-complexity algorithm for hyperspectral image compression that uses linear prediction in the spectral domain. We introduce a simple heuristic to estimate the performance of the linear predictor from a pixel spatial context and a context modeling mechanism with one-band look-ahead capability, which improves the overall compression with marginal usage of additional memory. The proposed method is suitable to spacecraft on-board implementation, where limited hardware and low power consumption are key requirements. Finally, we present a least-squares optimized linear prediction technique that achieves better compression on data cubes acquired by the NASA JPL Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS).

The LOCO-I lossless image compression algorithm: principles and standardization into JPEG-LS

LOCO-I (LOw COmplexity LOssless COmpression for Images) is the algorithm at the core of the new ISO/ITU standard for lossless and near-lossless compression of continuous-tone images, JPEG-LS. It is conceived as a "low complexity projection" of the universal context modeling paradigm, matching its modeling unit to a simple coding unit. By combining simplicity with the compression potential of context models, the algorithm "enjoys the best of both worlds." It is based on a simple fixed context model, which approaches the capability of the more complex universal techniques for capturing high-order dependencies. The model is tuned for efficient performance in conjunction with an extended family of Golomb-type codes, which are adaptively chosen, and an embedded alphabet extension for coding of low-entropy image regions. LOCO-I attains compression ratios similar or superior to those obtained with state-of-the-art schemes based on arithmetic coding. Moreover, it is within a few percentage points of the best available compression ratios, at a much lower complexity level. We discuss the principles underlying the design of LOCO-I, and its standardization into JPEC-LS.