Mathematical Morphology Tools for Gray-scale Image Compression

This work introduces a new algorithm for gray-scale image compression using mathematical morphology tools. In order to get a good compression ratio, a bit-plane decomposition is used. Different planes are coded by different methods. The first 4 more significant planes are coded by a combined boundary-sceleton technique, because they are preserving the most important part of information. For the last four least significant planes, taking into account that these planes are carrying less significant information, we can obtain a very good compression ratio by determining the density of probability for black/white pixel occurence and by transmitting only this parameter. Depending on the number of bit-planes coded, bitrates from 0,56 to 1,1 bits/pixel have been obtained. IMACS/IEEE CSCC'99 Proceedings, Pages:7261-7264