K. Belloulata, J. Konrad. Fractal Image Compression With Region-Based Functionality. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 11(4):351-362, 2002.
Region-based functionality offered by the MPEG-4 video compression standard is also appealing for still images, for example to permit object based queries of a still-image database. A popular method for still-image compression is fractal coding. However, traditinal fractal image coding uses rectangular range and domain blocks. Although new schemes have been proposed that merge small blocks into irregular shapes, the merging process does not, in general, produce a semantically meaningful region. We propose a new approach to fractal image coding that permits region-based functionalities; images are coded region by region according to a previously computed segmentation map. We use rectangular range and domain blocks, but devide boundary blocks into segments belonging to different regions. Since this prevents the use of standard dissimilarity measure, we propose a new measure adapted to segment shape. We propose two approaches: one in the spatial and one in the transform domain. While providing additional functionality, the proposed methods perform similar to other tested methods in terms of PSNR but often result in images that are subjectively better. Due to the limited domain-block codebook size, the new methods are very encouraging and show the potential of this approach for various internet and still-image database applications
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@article{BeKo02,
Author = {Belloulata, K. and Konrad, J.},
Title = {Fractal Image Compression With Region-Based Functionality},
Journal = {IEEE Transactions on Image Processing},
Volume = {11},
Number = {4},
Pages = {351--362},
Publisher = {},
Year = {2002}
}