A new searchless fractal image encoding method for a real-time image compression device

In this paper, we present a new searchless iterative function system (SIFS) fractal encoding method that encodes image range blocks based on fixed location domain blocks. The advantage of this method is that the fractal code does not contain coordinates (x,y) of the domain-range matched pairs. Therefore, the size of the range block can be as small as 2×2 pixels and still maintain a good compression rate and image quality. A fractal image encoding device based on the new method is implemented and tested. Finally, the experimental results of the fractal encoding device are presented. The results show that the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the compression rate of the reconstructed image are as good as the traditional domain block search methods. An FPGA implementation is capable of encoding a 256×256 8-bit gray-scale image in 0.63 ms. This provides the basis for real-time fractal image compression.