Fractal color image compression

The paper presents a new fractal color image compression method, called Fractal Hierarchical Color Block Coding (FHCBC), which transforms the three-color planes of a color image into a one-component image by extracting correlation among them. It hierarchically divides the three-color planes into homogeneous blocks, and for each such block, the variance of pixels´ trichromatic coefficients is within a certain threshold value. Then, each block is represented by its mean value of the pixels´ trichromatic coefficient ratios, and just a one-component image is composed and compressed by fractal coding. In the decoding process, the reconstruction is carried out by a fractal decoding algorithm and the associated mean values of trichromatic coefficient ratios. In comparison with the well known three-component Separated Fractal Coding (SFC), the suggested method generates performance gains in running time, high compression ratio and equal level of reconstruction quality