Fractal image coding using SSIM

Since Jacquin proposed original fractal image compression technique in 1990, fractal coding method has been developed into various schemes. Traditionally, fractal coding uses mean square error (MSE) to evaluate similarity of image blocks, but the similarity evaluated by MSE usually differs from human visual system (HVS). Compared with MSE, structural similarity (SSIM) is an image measure index which is more appropriate for the HVS. This paper proposes a new fractal coding scheme which uses structural similarity to measure the similarity between image blocks and compute these blocks´ coefficients. The experiment results show that the proposed method generates higher quality images for the HVS than MSE scheme.