Lossless image compression for few-colored images
AssigneeMicrosoft Technology Licensing, LLC
InventorSumanth Srinivasa Krishnaswamy
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Architecture that utilizes characteristics of high spatial redundancy and few colors in few-colored images to compress the image data in a hierarchical manner, and store block level information. The entire image is decomposed into fixed-size blocks, and the block color information (single-colored or multi-colored) is stored. All multi-colored blocks are further divided into smaller blocks (sub-blocks) in a lower level, and the sub-block information is stored as well. The process is performed recursively until there are no more multi-colored blocks, or until the block size reaches a minimum size (e.g., a 1×1 block or one pixel). The information is then entropy coded.
Claims20
A processor, and a memory device configured with instructions that when executed by the processor, cause the processor to enable an image compression processing system, the system comprising:
- an image decomposition component configured to decompose an entire image into blocks of equal size and a hierarchy of block levels, each block level comprising blocks of a single block size, the block levels comprising at least one of single-colored blocks or multi-colored blocks;
- a block information component configured to generate and store block information for the blocks;
- and
- an encoder component configured to entropy encode the block information into a compressed output.
A computer-implemented method of compression processing an image, comprising computer-executable instructions that when executed by a hardware processor cause the hardware processor to perform acts of:
- decomposing an entire image into blocks of equal size, the blocks characterized as single-colored blocks and multi-colored blocks;
- storing block information of the blocks at a given level of decomposition;
- decomposing multi-colored blocks of a previous level into blocks of equal size at a new level;
- recursively processing the blocks at given levels and storing the block information until processing is terminated based on termination criteria;
- and
- entropy coding the block information of the corresponding block levels.
A computer-implemented method of compression processing an image, comprising computer-executable instructions that when executed by a hardware processor cause the hardware processor to perform acts of:
- decomposing an entire image into fixed-sized blocks and a hierarchy of single-colored blocks and multi-colored blocks;
- storing color information of the single-colored blocks and storing index information of the multi-colored blocks at a given level as hierarchical block level information;
- recursively processing the multi-colored blocks into smaller sub-blocks and storing the index information and associated hierarchical block level information of the multi-colored blocks at the given levels, until processing terminates based on a block level of only single-colored blocks;
- and
- entropy coding the color list and hierarchy block level information of all block levels.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.