Iteration-free fractal image coding based on efficient domain pool design

The domain pool design is one of the dominant issues which affect the coding performance of fractal image compression. In this paper, we employ the LBG algorithm and propose a block averaging method to design the efficient domain pools based on a proposed iteration-free fractal image codec. The redundancies between the generated domain blocks are reduced by the proposed methods. Therefore, we can obtain the domain pools that are more efficient than those in the conventional fractal coding schemes and thus the coding performance is improved. On the other hand, the iteration process in the conventional fractal coding scheme not only requires a large size of memory and a high computation complexity but also prolongs the decoding process. The proposed iteration-free fractal codec can overcome the problems above. In computer simulation, both the LBG-based and block-averaging methods for the domain pool design in the proposed iteration free scheme achieve excellent performances. For example, based on the proposed block-averaging method, the decoded Lena image has at least a 0.5 dB higher PSNR (under the same bit rate) and an eight-time faster decoding speed than the conventional fractal coding schemes that require iterations.