An effective method for still image compression/decompression for transmission on PSTN lines based on modifications of Huffman coding

Abstract This paper presents an effective compression method suitable for transmission the still images on public switching telephone networks (PSTN). Since compression algorithm reduce the number of pixels or the gray levels of a source picture, therefore this will lead to the reduction of the amount of memory needed to store the source information or the time necessary for transmitting by a channel with a limited bandwidth. First, we introduced some current standards and finally the lossy DCT-based JPEG compression method is chosen. According to our studies, this method is one of the suitable methods. However, it is not directly applicable for image transmission on usual telephone lines (PSTN). Therefore, it must be modified considerably to be suitable for our purposes. From Shannon’s Information Theory, we know that for a given information source like an image there is a coding technique which permits a source to be coded with an average code length as close as to the entropy of the source as desired. So, we have modified the Huffman coding technique and obtained a new optimized version of this coding, which has a high speed and is easily implemented. Then, we have applied the DCT 1 and the FDCT 2 for compression of the data. We have analyzed and written the programs in C++ for image compression/decompression, which give a very high compression ratio (50:1 or more) with an excellent SNR. 3 In this paper, we present the necessary modifications on Huffman coding algorithms and the results of simulations on typical images.