Efficient quasi-lossless image compression for memory bandwidth reduction

This paper proposes an efficient quasi-lossless image compression for the memory bandwidth reduction in the image processing chip application. The proposed algorithm combines a directional predictor with a modified Golumb-Rice (GR) coder to implement basic lossless compression scheme, and adds a rate control scheme by quantizing the directional prediction error. The rate control scheme monitors actual amount of compressed bit-stream and enables the quantizer as the bit rates approaches to target rates. The proposed method shows that it can achieve more than 50% bandwidth reduction without loss of image quality.