A parallel image compression scheme based on fractal coding and vector quantization

In this paper the combination of fractal coding with a codebook to create a still image coder with the capability of parallelization is presented. The image is divided into equally sized regions which can be processed in parallel leading to high encoding speed. For each image block the search for the best approximation is performed only inside its corresponding region, instead of the whole image as in traditional fractal coding schemes. To compensate for a possible quality degradation, the search is extended to a codebook. In this way a significant decrease of the computational effort is achieved while the image quality is increased in terms of SNR.