Parallel and element-reduced Error-Diffused Block Truncation Coding

Block Truncation Coding (BTC) is an efficient compression technique for its inherent simple coding strategy. However, the annoying blocking effect and false contour accompanied in high coding gain configurations make the applications relatively limited compares to some up-to-date compression schemes. For this, Error-Diffused Block Truncation Coding (EDBTC) is proposed to solve these problems and obtain satisfactory results. Unfortunately, the EDBTC sacrifices the parallel advantage of traditional BTC. Moreover, the number of diffused directions of EDBTC can be reduced to obtain higher efficiency. For these, the Interlaced Error-Diffused Block Truncation Coding (IEDBTC) is proposed in this work to claim back the parallel advantage. In addition, the diffused elements are also reduced from four to two with the proposed optimization procedure while preserving the image quality.