Lossless Image Coding Based on Inter-color Prediction for Ultra High Definition Image

This paper addresses the lossless image coding for ultra-high definition television system which supports 4K (4096×2160) resolution image with 22.2ch audio. Ultra High Definition Tele-vision system is being developed to satisfy end-user who has a longing for higher resolution, higher quality, and higher fidelity picture and sound. However, the major characteristic of Ultra High Definition Tele-vision system is considerably huge input information must be processed in real-time compare to conventional systems. Therefore high speed data handling for editing and playing, high speed signal interface between devices and real-time source codecs without delay for saving memory space are unavoidable requirements of ultra-high system. This paper focused on lossless image codec for the reason of real-time processing with reasonable coding gain and the proposed algorithms is pixel based algorithms called spatio-color prediction. The proposed algorithm uses inter-color correlation with spatial correlation appropriately and it shows 5.5% coding efficiency improvement compare to JPEG-LS. The simulation was performed using 4K resolution RGB 10bit images and it is claimed that the proposed lossless coding was verified under the developed Ultra High Definition Tele-vision system.