SICLIC: a simple inter-color lossless image coder

Many applications require high-quality color images. In order to alleviate storage space and transmission time, while preserving high quality, these images are losslessly compressed. Most of the image compression algorithms treat the color image, usually in RGB format, as a set of independent gray-scale images. SICLIC is a novel inter-color coding algorithm based on a LOCO-like algorithm. It combines the simplicity of Golomb-Rice coding with the potential of context models in both intra-color and inter-color encoding. It also supports intra-color and inter-color alphabet extension, in order to reduce the redundancy of the code. SICLIC attains compression ratios superior to those obtained with most of the state-of-the-art compression algorithms and achieves compression ratios very close to those of inter-band CALIC, with much lower complexity. With arithmetic coding, SICLIC attains better compression than inter-band CALIC.