Context-Based Minimum MSE Prediction and Entropy Coding for Lossless Image Coding

In this paper, a novel gray-scale lossless image coder combining context-based minimum mean squared error (MMSE) prediction and entropy coding is proposed. To obtain context of prediction, this paper first defines directional difference according to sharpness of edge and gradients of localities of image data. Classification of 4 directional differences forms“geometry context”model which characterizes two-dimensional general image behaviors such as directional edge region, smooth region or texture. Based on this context model, adaptive DPCM prediction coefficients are calculated in MMSE sense and the prediction is performed. The MMSE method on context-by-context basis is more in accord with minimum entropy condition, which is one of the major objectives of the predictive coding. In entropy coding stage, context modeling method also gives useful performance. To reduce the statistical redundancy of the residual image, many contexts are preset to take full advantage of conditional probability in entropy coding and merged into small number of context in efficient way for complexity reduction. The proposed lossless coding scheme slightly outperforms the CALIC, which is the state-of-the-art, in compression ratio.