Combining Fractal Coding and Orthogonal Linear Transforms

Many desirable properties make fractals a powerful mathematic model applied in several image processing and pattern recognition tasks: image coding, segmentation, feature extraction, and indexing, just to cite some of them. Unfortunately, they are based on a strong asymmetric scheme, consequently suffering from very high coding times. On the other side, linear transforms are quite time balanced, allowing them to be usefully exploited in realtime applications, but they do not provide comparable performances with respect to the image quality for high bit rates. In this paper, we investigate different levels of embedding orthogonal linear transforms in the fractal coding scheme. Experimental results show a clear improved quality for compression ratios up to 15 : 1.