A bit-plane approach for lossless compression of color-quantized images

Palette reordering is a well-known and effective approach for improving the compression of color-indexed images. The performance of most of the existing palette reordering methods has been evaluated using the compression rates attained by image coders which are based on predictive or transform coding technology, such as JPEG-LS or JPEG2000. In this paper, we show that image coding technology based on bit-plane coding, such as the one used by JBIG, provides a competitive performance in this class of images. Also, we present a palette reordering algorithm, adapted for bit-plane based encoders, that gives good results and is faster than Mernon's or the modified Zeng's methods, the two most effective palette reordering algorithms.