Rate-Distortion Approach to Bit Allocation in Lossy Image Set Compression

In this paper we examine the problem of bit allocation in lossy image set compression. Instead of treating each image independently, image set compression algorithms examine the relationships among similar images and remove inter-image redundancies to improve compression performance. These algorithms map the original image set into a number of prediction residual images to be coded. Typically the same bit rate is used to encode each residual. We show that a rate-distortion approach based on Lagrangian optimization can lead to further improvement in image set compression algorithms.