Adjustable lossless image compression based on a natural splitting of an image into drawing, shading, and fine-grained components

The compression, or efficient coding, of single band or multispectral still images is becoming an increasingly important topic. While lossy compression approaches can produce reconstructions that are visually close to the original, many scientific and engineering applications require exact (lossless) reconstructions. However, the most popular and efficient lossless compression techniques do not fully exploit the two-dimensional structural links existing in the image data. We describe here a general approach to lossless data compression that effectively exploits two-dimensional structural links of any length. After describing in detail two main variants on this scheme, we discuss experimental results.