Predictive graph construction for image compression

In this work, we propose a new method of graph construction for graph-based image compression. In particular, because of the overhead incurred by graph transmission to the receiver, we focus our attention to develop an efficient method to construct and to code the graph representation of the image. The proposed method employs innovative edge metrics, quantization and prediction techniques, leading to a compact yet high-quality graph, corresponding to a very efficient transform that performs very well on natural as well as piece-wise smooth images. We have tested our method on different images and, compared to the standard DCT, it provides an average quality gain of 1.6 dB.