Speeding Up Fractal Image Compression by Reducing Image Size

Abstract

In fractal compression the image to be encoded is partitioned into blocks called (ranges). Each range is coded by reference to some other part of the image called (domain) and by some affine transformation parameters. The number of ranges plays an important role in the compression ratio, encoding time and reconstructed image quality. In order to obtain high compression ratios, only a small number of blocks are allowed. Reducing the number of image partitions (Range Blocks) while keeping as much as possible the quality of the reconstructed image is the goal of this work (since, as the number of the ranges is reduced, the encoding time will be reduced and the compression ratio will be increased).In the proposed technique "Speeding up Fractal Image Compression (SFIC)", the image to be encoded is reduced to its quarter size then it will be partitioned to get about the quarter number of ranges produced in the traditional Fractal Image Compression (FIC), in the decoding stage the image will be decoded to its original size. From the experimental results we found that SFIC gives a high reduction in the encoding time and high increasing in the compression ratio with good reconstructed image quality.