FCE: a fast content expression for server-based computing

Server-based computing (SBC) is an approach delivering computational services across the network with advantages of reduced administrative costs and better resource utilization. In SBC, all application processing is done on servers and only screen updates are sent to clients. We introduce a fast content expression (FCE) for screen updates coding. Given a square region of pixel values, FCE constructs a table of unique pixel values in the region and converts each value in the original region into an index into the table. We have implemented our algorithm and compared it with other popular coding methods, including JPEG-LS, JPEG, gif, gzip, VNC hextile, and various combinations. Our results show that our approach provides low coding complexity with reasonable compression.