Fast fractal image compression using spatial correlation

Fractal image compression is time consuming in the encoding process. The time is essentially spent on the search for the best-match block in a large domain pool. In this paper, the spatial correlations in both the domain pool and the range pool are utilized to reduce the searching space. With this technique, the encoding speed is 2.6 times faster than that of the full search method while the quality of the retrieved image is almost the same. Moreover, since the searching space is limited to the matched blocks of the previous range blocks, fewer bits are required to represent the transform. The bit rate is thus improved by about 20%.