An efficient lossy cartoon image compression method

This paper introduces a new lossy approach for compression of cartoon images. The image is firstly partitioned into regions of roughly the same colour. The chain codes are then determined of all regions. The sequence of the obtained chain code symbols is transformed with the Burrows-Wheeler Transform, Move-To-Front transform, and compressed with Run-Length Encoding. In the final step, an arithmetic encoder may be used to compress the obtained binary stream additionally. The proposed algorithm is asymmetric, meaning that the decompression does not reverse all the steps of the compression procedure. The experimental results have shown that the described method produces considerably better compression ratios than JPEG, JPEG2000, WebP, SPIHT, PNG, and two of the algorithms specialised in compression of cartoon images: the algorithm using quad-tree, and RS-LZ algorithm.