An Enhanced Adaptive Block Truncation Coding with Edge Quantization Scheme

Recently, image compression using adaptive block truncation coding based on edge quantization (ABTC-EQ) was proposed by Mathews and Nair. Their approach deals with an image for two types of blocks, edge blocks and non-edge blocks. Different from using the bi-clustering approach on all blocks in previous block truncation coding (BTC)-like schemes, ABTC-EQ adopts tri-clustering to tackle edge blocks. The compression ratio of ABTC-EQ is reduced, but the visual quality of the reconstructed image is significantly improved. However, it is observed that ABTC-EQ uses 2 bits to represent the index of three clusters in a block. We can only use an average of 5/3 bits by variable-length code to represent the index of each cluster. On the other hand, there are two observations on the quantization levels in a block. The first observation is that the difference between the two quantization values is often smaller than the quantization values themselves. The second observation is that more clusters may enhance the visual quality of the reconstructed image. Based on variable-length coding and the above observations, we design variants of ABTC-EQ to enhance the visual quality of the reconstructed image and compression ratio.