Hierarchical SOM applied to image compression

The increase of the need for image storage and transmission in computer systems has increased the importance of signal and image compression algorithms. The approach involving vector quantization (VQ) relies on the design of a finite set of codes which will substitute the original signal during transmission with a minimal of distortion, taking advantage of the spatial redundancy of image to compress them. Algorithms such as LBG and SOM work in an unsupervised way toward finding a good codebook for a given training data. However, the number of code vectors (N) needed for VQ increases with the vector dimension, and full-search algorithms such as LBG and SOM can lead to large training and coding times. An alternative for reducing the computational complexity is the use of a tree-structured vector quantization algorithm. This paper presents an application of a hierarchical SOM for image compression which reduces the search complexity from O(N) to O(log N), enabling a faster training and image coding. Results are given for conventional SOM, LBG and HSOM, showing the advantage of the proposed method