Modified JPEG Huffman coding

It is a well observed characteristic that when a DCT block is traversed in the zigzag order, the AC coefficients generally decrease in size and the run-length of zero coefficients increase in number. This article presents a minor modification to the Huffman coding of the JPEG baseline compression algorithm to exploit this redundancy. For this purpose, DCT blocks are divided into bands so that each band can be coded using a separate code table. Three implementations are presented, which all move the end-of-block marker up in the middle of DCT block and use it to indicate the band boundaries. Experimental results are presented to compare reduction in the code size obtained by our methods with the JPEG sequential-mode Huffman coding and arithmetic coding methods. The average code reduction to the total image code size of one of our methods is 4%. Our methods can also be used for progressive image transmission and hence, experimental results are also given to compare them with two-, three-, and four-band implementations of the JPEG spectral selection method.