• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.2326-2345
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• 2016

For the compression of color images, a common bitmap usually is generated to replace the three individual bitmaps that originate from block truncation coding (BTC) of the R, G and B channels. However, common bitmaps generated by some traditional schemes are not the best possible because they do not consider the minimized distortion of the entire color image. In this paper, we propose a near-optimized common bitmap scheme for BTC using Binary Ant Colony Optimization (BACO), producing a BACO-BTC scheme. First, the color image is compressed by the BTC algorithm to get three individual bitmaps, and three pairs of quantization values for the R, G, and B channels. Second, a near-optimized common bitmap is generated with minimized distortion of the entire color image based on the idea of BACO. Finally, the color image is reconstructed easily by the corresponding quantization values according to the common bitmap. The experimental results confirmed that reconstructed image of the proposed scheme has better visual quality and less computational complexity than the referenced schemes.