A new class of near-lossless coding allowing estimation of ?? bound

This paper proposes a new class of near-lossless (NL) coding, which enables to estimate the ℓ_∞ bound specified in the first coding. This estimation is needed when a new ℓ_∞ bound is specified again in the second coding. However, so far, the conventional studies on NL coding have not taken account of this issue for re-encoding, but they have focused on the coding efficiency of the first coding and computational cost. In the proposed NL algorithm, a new spatial quantization, referred to as zero-skip quantization, is designed not only to estimate the ℓ_∞ bound, but also to utilize histogram sparsity for improving the coding efficiency. Some experimental evaluations are demonstrated against the JPEG-LS standard, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed one.