ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the basic aspects of color image compression. It provides an introduction to compression methods, explores the issues pertaining to the intersection of the several topics compression and color without exploring them individually. The chapter focuses on color image information and its interaction with the compression. Transform coding is perhaps the most popular method of compression. The input image data is transformed, quantized, and encoded. The encoding step provides lossless compression and simply converts numbers to some binary representation in a reversible manner. The data are transformed, and each transformed sample may undergo different quantization. In a manner similar to block transforms, the wavelet transforms aims at transforming the image data into a representation where a few coefficients convey most of the information to reconstruct the image. After a pixel-by-pixel color transform, each transformed image plane is fed to monochrome compressors whose compressed bitstreams are multiplexed somehow to produce the output compressed stream.
