Near-lossless/lossless compression of error-diffused images using a two-pass approach

The current international standard, the Joint Bilevel Image Experts Group (JBIG), is a representative of a bilevel image compression algorithm. It compresses bilevel images with high performance, but it shows relatively low performance in compressing error-diffused halftone images. This paper proposes a new bilevel image compression for error-diffused images, which is based on Bayes' theorem. The proposed coding procedure consists of two passes. It groups 2 x 2 dots into a cell, where each cell is represented by the number of black dots and the locations of the black dots in the cell. The number of black dots in the cell is encoded in the first pass, and their locations are encoded in the second pass. The first pass performs a near-lossless compression, which can be refined to be lossless by the second pass. Experimental results show a high compression performance for the proposed method when it is applied to error-diffused images.