Image compression with fractals

Fractal image compression has gone through more than twenty years developments among which, IFS based compression algorithm stands out as the most promising direction for further research and development. The basic idea is to represent an image by fractals. Each fractal is then represented by a so called IFS which consists of a group of affine transformations. Therefore, an input image can virtually be represented by a group of IFS codes rather than pixels. In this way, a compression ratio as high as 10000:1 can be achieved. Since the image is represented by fractals and each IFS consist of affine transformations, the key point for this algorithm is to find the affine transformation for each fractal and to find fractals which can best describe the original image