A novel method in reducing the complexity of fractal encoding

Fractal coding is a promising technique for image compression. However, one of the challenges for cost effective implementation is to reduce the huge computational complexity of the encoder. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to address this issue, Firstly, we replace mean square error with mean absolute error as distortion measure to reduce multiplication. Secondly, we use statistical normalization to eliminate the need to compute the scaling factor and offset during the search. Thirdly, we change the domain block search to range block search to reduce memory requirement. Simulation results suggest that our algorithm can reduce computation by three order of magnitude for a QC1F image with negligible visual degradation.