A Preprocessing Algorithm for Efficient Lossless Compression of Gray Scale Images

This paper introduces a new preprocessing scheme to replace original data of gray scale images with particular ordered data so that performance of lossless compression can be improved more efficiently. As a kind of preprocessing technique to maximize performance of entropy encoder, the proposed method converts the input image data into more compressible form. Before encoding a stream of the input image, the proposed preprocessor counts co-occurrence frequencies for neighboring pixel pairs. Then, it replaces each pair of adjacent gray values with particular ordered numbers based on the investigated co-occurrence frequencies. When compressing ordered image using entropy encoder, we can expect to raise compression rate more highly because of enhanced statistical feature of the input image. In this paper, we show that lossless compression rate increased by up to 37.85% when comparing results from compressing preprocessed and non-preprocessed image data using entropy encoder such as Huffman, Arithmetic encoder.