DCT compression using Golomb-Rice coding

In a digital cinema system, a method of compressing a digital image, the image comprising pixel data, the pixel data separated into color components, the method comprising the acts of:

• reading a group of a color component of pixel data;
• generating a block size assignment to divide the group of a color component of pixel into sub-blocks of pixel data;
• transforming the sub-blocks of pixel data into corresponding frequency domain representations;
• and
• scaling the frequency domain representations into a stream of data, wherein the act of scaling is based on a quality metric correlating with the quality of the image;
• compiling at least one group of data from the stream data that may be represented as a 16×16 block;
• dividing the 16×16 group of data into groups that maybe represented as four 8×8 blocks;
• serializing each of the four 8×8 blocks of data;
• and
• run-length coding the serialized data using an exponential distribution wherein the run-length code is determined using the equation
• ⌈
• log
• 2
• ⁢
• R
• rl
• N
• rl
• ⌉
• where Rrl is an cumulative value and Nrl is the number of time the value is accumulated.