BTC-based Coding using Color Space Conversion for Low Bit-rate Compression

Abstract

This paper proposes an image data coding method for the remote-support system. The remote-support system, which helps the activity of the ambulance and the users of electric wheel chars, and so on, uses the wireless communication. Since the wireless communication is unstable and narrow bandwidth, the transmitted image data shall be compressed with very low bit-rate. However, the images compressed by the traditional methods are not suitable for the remote-support, since they are often distorted the color information and lose the sharpness of edges. To overcome this problem, the new compression method proposed in this paper is developed based on BTC (Block Truncation Coding), which has the capability to preserve the edge shape of the image. Additionally, it is introduced the following techniques: new color space conversion to improve the color resolution, and new image filter to remove the block noise generated by BTC process.