A fast no search fractal image coding method

A new no search fractal image coding scheme is introduced which is able to improve the speed of fractal image compression greatly. Every time-consuming part of fractal coding is redesigned and accelerated with new techniques. Compared with the most recent scheme of Tong and Wong, this method speeds up the encoding process by 22 times and maintain the compression quality. Experiments on standard images show that the proposed scheme gets the fastest speed of fractal image coding up to the present and holds high reconstruction fidelity. For example, using PII 450 MHz PC, the proposed scheme spends 0.515 s to compress the Lena (512 x 512 x 8) with 36.04 dB PSNR decoding quality. Using Dell PIV 2.8 GHz PC, it spends only 0.078 s to finish the encoding process and gets 36.04 dB PSNR. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.