A Nonuniform High-Quality Image Compression Method to Preserve User-Specified Compression Ratio

Most of image compression methods are based on frequency domain transforms that are followed by a quantization and rounding approach to discard some coefficients. It is obvious that the quality of compressed images highly depends on the manner of discarding these coefficients. However, finding a good balance between image quality and compression ratio is an important issue in such manners. In this paper, a new lossy compression method called linear mapping image compression (LMIC) is proposed to compress images with high quality while the user-specified compression ratio is satisfied. This method is based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) and an adaptive zonal mask. The proposed method divides image to equal size blocks and the structure of zonal mask for each block is determined independently by considering its gray-level distance (GLD). The experimental results showed that the presented method had higher pick signal to noise ratio (PSNR) in comparison with some related works in a specified compression ratio. In addition, the results were comparable with JPEG2000.