Abstract
This paper presents a new design technique for performing high quality low bit rate image compression. A hybrid coder(HC) which combines Mean Removed Important Coefficient Selection based JPEG(MR-ICS-JPEG) and Adaptive Vector Quantization (AVQ) is proposed. A new quantization table is developed using the Important Coefficient Selection(ICS) method; the importance of each coefficient is determined using the orthonormal property of the DCT. This quantization table is applied to standard JPEG with mean removal(MR) strategy before processing. This scheme, called MR-ICS-JPEG, produces more than 2 dB enhanced performance in terms of PSNR over standard JPEG. A set of homogeneous codebooks is generated by homogeneous training vectors. Before compression, an image is uniformly divided into 8${\times}$8 blocks. Low detail regions such as backgrounds are roughly coded by AVQ while high detail regions such as edges or curves are finely coded by the proposed MR-ICS-JPEG. This hybrid coder procuces consistently about 3 dB improved performance in terms of PSNR over standard JPEG.