A gray image compression using a Hilbert scan

Hilbert curve is one of the space-filling curves published by Peano. There are several applications using this curve such as image processing, computer hologram, etc. In this paper, we concentrate on a lossy compression technique for a gray image using the Hilbert curve. The merit of this curve is to pass through all points in a quadrant, and it always moves to the neighbor quadrant. Our method is based on this neighborhood property, by a simple segmentation of the scanned one-dimensional data using a zero order interpolation. From our experiments, we have confirmed that in spite of the simple computation in comparison to JPEG, acceptable quality images can be obtained at bit-rates above 0.6 bit/pixel