Simple and efficient lossless coding for continuous tone color images

A simple lossless color image compression scheme is proposed. It utilizes integer color transform and integer wavelet transform to ensure complete reversibility with fixed-point implementation. In the encoding process, the wavelet coefficients are divided into smaller block in order to increase the performance of arithmetic coding which is applied to the actual values of transform coefficients. Without any prediction or other model in the process, this very simple coder has low complexity along with promising compression efficiency in continuous tone image. The comparison with lossless JPEG 2000 and JPEG-LS reveals that it has almost the same performance as the state-of-the-art standards. With its fast and low complexity algorithm, the proposed coder is suitable to be used within wireless sensor nodes in wireless sensor network.