Very High Quality Compression of Color and Gray Scale Images: Techniques and Applications

| This paper presents an overview of the current state of the art in lossless and quasi-lossless image coding research. Emphasis is put on two important application areas, in which high quality coding is essential: medical imaging and the pre-press industry. The paper brieey discusses the basic principles of the most important techniques and compares these techniques from the point of view of compression ratio, image quality and processing speed. Some attention is paid to innovative techniques , e.g., lossless transform coding techniques and techniques for the eecient representation of color in images.