A low-complexity screen compression scheme

This paper presents a block-based low-complexity screen compression scheme. In this scheme, the input screen is split into non-overlapping blocks which are classified as pictorial blocks and textual blocks. We design a low-complexity yet efficient algorithm to compress the textual blocks. We use base colors plus escape pixels to represent and quantize the text pixels, and such quantization mechanism not only achieves high compression efficiency but also keeps low encoding/decoding complexity. We also propose the two-direction predictive index coding and hierarchical pattern coding technologies to utilize the local spatial correlation and the global pattern correlation for text pixels. In addition, to utilize the correlation between the luminance and chrominance channels, we propose a joint-channel index coding method to further improve the compression efficiency. The compression efficiency and complexity of the proposed method is evaluated against the popular image codecs JPEG/JPEG200 and PNG, a recent published screen compression scheme HJPC as well as the popular video codec H.264.