An HVS based adaptive quantization scheme for the compression of color images

In this paper a Human Visual System based adaptive quantization scheme is proposed. The proposed algorithm supports perceptually lossless as well as lossy compression. The algorithm uses a transform based compression approach using the wavelet transform, and has incorporated vision models for the compression of both luminance and chrominance components. The major strength of the coder is the incorporation of the vision model for the chrominance components and the optimum way in which the scales are distributed among the luminance and chrominance components to achieve higher compression ratios. The perceptual model developed for the color components gives flexibility for giving more compression for the color components without causing any color degradations. For each image the visual thresholds are evaluated and an optimum bit allocation is done in such a way that the quantization error is always less than the visual distortion for the given rate. To validate the strength of the proposed algorithm, the perceptual quality of the images reconstructed using the proposed coder is compared with the images reconstructed with JPEG2000 standard coder, for the same compression. To evaluate the perceptual quality of the compressed images latest perceptual quality matrices such as Structural Similarity Index, Visual Information Fidelity and Visual Signal-to-Noise Ratio are used. The results obtained reveal that the proposed structure gives excellent improvement in perceptual quality compared to the existing schemes, for both lossy as well as lossless compression. These advantages make the proposed algorithm a good candidate for replacing the quantizer stage of the current image compression standards.