VSA-based fractal image compression

Spiral Architecture (SA) is a novel image structure which has hexagons but not squares as the basic elements. Apart from many other advantages in image processing, SA has shown two unbeatable characters that have potential to improve image compression performance, namely, Locality of Pixel Density and Uniform Image Partitioning. Fractal image compression is a relatively recent image compression method which exploits similarities in different parts of the image. The basic idea is to represent an image as fixed points of Iterated Function Systems (IFS). Therefore, an input image can be represented by a series of IFS codes rather than pixels. In this way, an amazing compression ratio 10000:1 can be achieved. The application of fractal image compression presented in this paper is based on Spiral Architecture. Since there is no mature capture and display device for hexagon-based images, the experiments are implemented on a newly proposed mimic scheme, called Virtual Spiral Architecture (VSA). The experimental results in the paper have shown that introducing Spiral Architecture into fractal image compression will improve the compression performance in image quality with little trade-off in compression ratio. A lot of research work exists in this area to further improve the results.