Fast Image Coding Using Simple Image Patterns

We present a very fast image coding algorithm that employs the recently-developed visual pattern image coding (VPIC) algorithm embedded in a multi-resolution (pyramid) structure. At each level in the hierarchy, the image is coded by the VPIC algorithm [1]. The low-resolution images coded at the upper levels of the pyramid are used to augment coding of the higher-resolution images. The interaction between the different resolution levels is both simple and computationally efficient, and yields a significant increase in compression ratio relative to simple VPIC with improved image quality and with little increase in complexity. The resulting hierarchical VPIC (HVPIC) algorithm achieves compression ratios of about 24:1 and in the implementation demonstrated here, requires only 22.8 additions and 3.84 multiplications per image pixel.