Region-based fractal image compression using heuristic search

Presents work carried out on fractal (or attractor) image compression. The approach relies on the assumption that image redundancy can be efficiently exploited through self-transformability. The algorithms described utilize a novel region-based partition of the image that greatly increases the compression ratios achieved over traditional block-based partitionings. Due to the large search spaces involved, heuristic algorithms are used to construct these region-based transformations. Results for three different heuristic algorithms are given. The results show that the region-based system achieves almost double the compression ratio of the simple block-based system at a similar decompressed image quality. For the Lena image, compression ratios of 41:1 can be achieved at a PSNR of 26.56 dB.