Adaptation of visually lossless colour coding to JPEG2000 in the composite colour space

A visually lossless colour image (VLCI) coder is proposed based on the embedded block coding with optimized truncation (EBCOT) [D. Taubman, July 2000] coding structure. The VLCI coder is adapted with the contrast gain control [A. B. Watson and J. A. Solomon, 1997] model for the identification and removal of visually redundant information in the spectral domain prior to encoding. Since no additional side information are required and no modifications are involved at the decoding end, this coder is fully compliant with the EBCOT bitstream. Thus, it can be easily adapted to any JPEG2000 standard coder. The proposed coder has been designed to perform visually lossless compression independent of viewing distances. It currently operates in the Y_DC_bC_r composite colour domain. Simulation results of the VLCI coder has shown marked improvements over the LOCO [M. Weinberger et al., 1996] and the near-lossless LOCO (d2) coder in terms of compression ratio.