Exploiting multi-scale support vector regression for image compression

Unlike traditional neural networks that require predefined topology of the network, support vector regression (SVR) approach can model the data within the given level of accuracy with only a small subset of the training data, which are called support vectors (SVs). This property of sparsity has been exploited as the basis for image compression. In this paper, for still image compression, we propose a multi-scale support vector regression (MS-SVR) approach, which can model the images with steep variations and smooth variations very well resulting in good performance. We test our proposed MS-SVR based algorithm on some standard images. The experimental results verify that the proposed MS-SVR achieves better performance than standard SVR. And in a wide range of compression ratio, MS-SVR is very close to JPEG in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) but exhibits better subjective quality. Furthermore, MS-SVR even outperforms JPEG on both PSNR and subjective quality when the compression ratio is higher enough, for example 25:1 for Lena image. Even when compared with JPEG-2000, the results show greatly similar trend as those in JPEG experiments, except that the compression ratio is a bit higher where our proposed MS-SVR will outperform JPEG-2000.