Image Compression Using Run Length Encoding and Lempel Ziev Welch Method

Images are among the most common and popular representations of data. Digital images are used for professional and personal use ranging from official documents to social media. Thus, any Organization or individual needs to store and share a large number of images. One of the most common issues associated with using images is the potentially large file-size of the image. Advancements in image acquisition technology and an increase in the popularity of digital content means that images now have very high resolutions and high quality, inevitably leading to an increase in size. Storage limitations on any device mean that only a small number of such images can be stored. Moreover, transmitting and uploading larger images takes up more time and bandwidth. Image compression has thus emerged as a vital part of image processing. The need of the hour is to reduce the size of the image as much as possible ,while maintaining a high level of quality and preserving all the details in the image. Compressed images can also be transmitted faster and require less bandwidth. In this paper we will be discussing two compression techniques- "Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW)" and "Run length Encoding (RLE))" and how to implement them. We will then compare them based on certain parameters.