Technique for lossless compression of color images based on hierarchical prediction, inversion, and context adaptive coding

Among the variety of multimedia formats, color images play a prominent role. A technique for lossless compression of color images is introduced. The technique is composed of first transforming a red, green, and blue image into luminance and chrominance domain (Y CuCv). Then, the luminance channel Y is compressed with a context-based, adaptive, lossless image coding technique (CALIC). After processing the chrominance channels with a hierarchical prediction technique that was introduced earlier, Burrows-Wheeler inversion coder or JPEG 2000 is used in compression of those Cu and Cv channels. It is demonstrated that, on a wide variety of images, particularly on medical images, the technique achieves substantial compression gains over other wellknown compression schemes, such as CALIC, M-CALIC, Better Portable Graphics, JPEG-LS, JPEG 2000, and the previously proposed hierarchical prediction and context-adaptive coding technique LCIC.