Enhancing fractal image compression speed using peer adjacent mapping with sum of absolute difference for computed radiography images

The encoding phase in full-search fractal image compression (FIC) is time-intensive as a sequential search must be performed through a massive domain pool to find the best-matched domain for each block of ranges. In this paper, a peer adjacent with the sum of absolute difference (SAD) mapping has been suggested to enhance the FIC speed while retaining the reconstructed image quality. The SAD similarity measure applied in searching the most matching domain between domain pool for a range before transformation in order to shorten the mapping process. Therefore, instead of performing a complete search in the next level, one requires to only search a close neighbourhood of the region computed from the previous search. The efficiency of the proposed method is evaluated using standard test image, SMPTE test pattern and standard computed radiography digital images from JSRT database, from which the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), compression time and compression ratio are calculated. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2020 Author(s).