This paper proposes a unified coding algorithm for the lossless and near-lossless compression of still color images. The proposed unified color image coding scheme can control the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the reconstructed image while the level of distortion on the RGB plane is suppressed to within a preset magnitude. In order to control the PSNR, the distortion level is adaptively changed at each pixel. An adaptive quantizer to control the distortion is designed on the basis of psychovisual criteria. Finally, experiments on Super High Definition (SHD) images show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

This paper describes a unified coding algorithm for lossless and near-lossless color image compression that exploits the correlations between RGB signals. A reversible color transform that removes the correlations between RGB signals while avoiding any finite word length limitation is proposed for the lossless case. The resulting algorithm gives higher performance than the lossless JPEG without the color transform. Next, the lossless algorithm is extended to a unified coding algorithm of lossless and near-lossless compression schemes that can control the level of the reconstruction error on the RGB plane from 0 to p, where p is a certain small non-negative integer. The effectiveness of this algorithm was demonstrated experimentally.