Improved elastic storage of digital still images

Summary form only given. We recently proposed elastic storage, a new solution for storing a variable number of images in a fixed storage space. Initially, when only a few images are stored, they are stored losslessly (or near-losslessly). When more images have to be added, the storage space occupied by the previously stored images is adjusted to fit in each new image. A variable amount of space is allocated to each image, depending on its complexity. The implementation is based on bit-rate scalable image compression methods (such as JPEG 2000), which enable the data for each new image to simply overwrite part of the data of previously stored images. Thus, the method operates without any decoding and re-encoding of image data on the storage medium. The new strategy is implemented by a simple modification of the compressed image data block significance values used for the elastic storage method. Therefore, all basic operations (store, retrieve, delete) remain the same and the low complexity of the original strategy implementation is retained.