Comparison of H.264/Avc-Intra Technique for Compound and Natural Image Compression

Currently, the notion of paperless office is being promoted as part of eco-projects in many industries, where paper documents are converted into electronic documents. These images are termed as ‘Compound images’ and are defined as images that contain a combination of text, natural (photo) images and graphic images. The number of documents stored in electronic format is increasing enormously and this in turn, is increasing the need for efficient storage and transmission techniques. Different compression techniques are proposed for natural and compound images. Algorithms that work for natural images need not work well for compound images and vice versa. A single algorithm that suits both compound and natural images is beneficial in many applications including the Internet. In this paper, two such algorithms based on H.264/AVC Intra are selected and its efficiency in compressing both natural and compound images are analyzed and compared.