Matched-texture coding for structurally lossless compression

We propose a new texture-based compression approach that relies on new texture similarity metrics and is able to exploit texture redundancies for significant compression gains without loss of visual quality, even though there may visible differences with the original image (structurally lossless). Existing techniques rely on point-by-point metrics that cannot account for the stochastic and repetitive nature of textures. The main idea is to encode selected blocks of textures - as well as smooth blocks and blocks containing boundaries between smooth and/or textured regions - by pointing to previously occurring (already encoded) blocks of similar textures, blocks that are not encoded in this way, are encoded by a baseline method, such as JPEG. Experimental results with natural images demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach.