An improved image compression approach with combined wavelet and self organizing maps

Images require substantial storage and transmission resources, thus image compression is advantageous to reduce these requirements. A good strategy of pictures compression should assure a good compromise between a high compression rate and a low distortion of the picture. In this paper, we present a direct solution method based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for incremental self organizing map (ISOM) [11] image compression. This method is a combination of DWT decomposition and ISOM image compression. Wavelet transform is applied to entire images, so it produces no blocking artefacts; this is a major advantage of wavelet compression over other transform compression methods. The results show that the DWT for input image succeeded to improve high performances in terms of compression ratio and reconstruction quality.