On lossless image compression using the Burrows-Wheeler Transform

The Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is known to be very effective in compressing text data. However, there is still a debate on its performance on images. Motivated by a theoretical analysis of the performance of BWT and MTF, we perform a detailed empirical study on the role of MTF in compressing images with the BWT. We propose two schemes for BWT-based image coding, namely BLIC and BLICX, the later being based on the context-ordering property of the BWT. Experimental results using a set of standard test images show that each of the proposed methods outperformed state-of-the-art lossless image coders, such as CALIC, JPEG-LS, and PPAM.