Adaptive selection of colour transformations for reversible image compression

This paper presents and investigates a new family of reversible low-complexity colour transformations. It shows that, for a reasonably large set of natural images, there is a colour transform which performs better in the context of lossless image compression than the reversible colour transform defined in the JPEG2000 standard, while having only slightly increased complexity. The optimal selection of a colour space for each single image can distinctly decrease the bitrate of the compressed image. A novel approach is proposed, which automatically selects a suitable colour space with negligible loss of performance compared to the optimal selection.