Lossless Color Image Compression using Double Level RCT in BBWCA

A new lossless image compression scheme for natural color images which is based on double level Reversible Color Transform(RCT) and Bi-level Burrows Wheeler Compression Algorithm(BBWCA) is proposed. The first level RCT from RGB to HSV provide higher reduction in number of unique hue components, thus gives higher compression in case of natural images. The first level RCT followed by the second level RCT from HSV to YUV helps to yield small number of unique Y component values. DC level shifting and twos complement operation will be applied as preprocessing steps to second level RCT. The result of double level RCT is used as the input to BBWCA, in which row-wise BWT followed by column-wise BWT is applied. The compressed image data is formed by using move-to-front(MTF), Run-length-encoding and Entropy coding. The proposed method using double level RCT with BBWCA results in high compression by taking advantage of reduction in hue components of natural images. Among the different color space compared, the proposed method achieves better compression and is well suited for small and large size natural images. Proposed method make use of a double level RCT on the existing BBWCA algorithm and resulted in improving the compression ratio by 46 percentage.