Mutual multi-image compression based on fractal mating coding

Conventional fractal coding techniques explore only the self-similarity in an image (i.e., the intra-image similarity) to achieve compression. The paper proposes a fractal mating coding (FMC) method that also utilizes the similarity between two or more images (i.e., the inter-image similarity). In the proposed FMC method, two or more images are mutually encoded and decoded. This provides the security/protection property that only mutually encoded images can be correctly decoded. Computer experiments for the proposed FMC method are provided and the simulation result shows that the peak signal-to-noise ratio can be improved, on average, by more than 1 dB under the same bit rate for the test images