BTC-VQ-DCT hybrid coding of digital images

A hybrid BTC-VQ-DCT (block truncation coding, vector quantization, and discrete cosine transform) image coding algorithm is presented. The algorithm combines the simple computation and edge preservation properties of BTC and the high fidelity and high-compression ratio of adaptive DCT with the high-compression ratio and good subjective performance of VQ, and can be implemented with significantly lower coding delays than either VQ or DCT alone. The bit-map generated by BTC is decomposed into a set of vectors which are vector quantized. Since the space of the BTC bit-map is much smaller than that of the original 8-b image, a lookup-table-based VQ encoder has been designed to `fast encode´ the bit-map. Adaptive DCT coding using residual error feedback is implemented to encode the high-mean and low-mean subimages. The overall computational complexity of BTC-VQ-DCT coding is much less than either DCT and VQ, while the fidelity performance is competitive. The algorithm has strong edge-preserving ability because of the implementation of BTC as a precompress decimation. The total compression ratio is about 10:1