Lossless color and multispectral images coding with inter-band compensated prediction

We propose, here, a new technique for exploiting spectral redundancy in color and multispectral images. To decorrelate spectrally the pixels, inter-band compensated prediction is used, where the intensity in a given band is approximated by compensating the changes between it and an adjacent band, as is done in video coding. There is a large spatial similarity between the spectral bands but at different intensity levels caused by the difference in sensitivity of the bands, imposed by the imaging system. The coder will predict the luminance intensity of a pixel by compensating this effect between the bands. A possible very simple scheme is presented here, and applied to color images. The first results obtained with this approach are similar to those of the current state-of-the-art lossless coders with color transforms. More important, this technique is very simple and allows many additional promoting improvements in the future.