Abstract
This paper presents a new prediction method RBP region-based prediction model where the context used for prediction contains regions instead of individual pixels. There is a meaningful property that RBP can partition a cartoon image into two distinctive types of regions, one containing full-color backgrounds and the other containing boundaries, edges and homo-chromatic areas. With the development of computer techniques, synthetic images created with CG (computer graphics) becomes attractive. Like the demand on data compression, it is imperative to efficiently compress synthetic images such as cartoon animation generated with CG for storage of finite capacity and transmission of narrow bandwidth. This paper utilizes the property of RBP to partition cartoon images into two regions and then apply a lossy compression method to full-color regions and a lossless compression method to homo-chromatic and boundaries regions. Two criteria for partitioning are described, constant criterion and variable criterion. The latter criterion, in form of a linear function, gives the different threshold for classification in terms of contents of the image of interest. We carry out experiments by applying our method to a sequence of cartoon animation. Compared with the available image compression standard MPEG-1,our method gives the superior results in both compression ratio and complexity.
