A Proposition of Mobile Fractal Image Decompression

Multimedia are becoming one of the most important elements of the user interface with regard to the acceptance of modern mobile devices. The multimodal content that is delivered and available for a wide range of mobile telephony terminals is indispensable to bind users to a system and its services. Currently available mobile devices are equipped with multimedia capabilities and decent processing power and storage area. The most crucial factors are then the bandwidth and costs of media transfer. This is particularly visible in mobile gaming, where textures represent the bulk of binary data to be acquired from the content provider. Image textures have traditionally added visual realism to computer graphics. The realism increases with the resolution of textures. This represents a challenge to the limited bandwidth of mobile-oriented systems. The challenge is even more obvious in mobile gaming, where single image depicts a collection of shots or animation cycles for sprites and a backdrop scenery. In order to increase the efficiency of image and image texture transfer, a fractal based compression scheme is proposed. The main idea is to use an asymmetric server-client architecture. The resource demanding compression process is performed on the server side while the client part decompresses highly packed image data. The method offers a very high compression ratio for pictures representing image textures for natural scenes. It aims to minimize the transmission bandwidth that should speed up the downloading process and minimize the cost and time of data transfer. The paper focuses on the implementation of fractal decompression schemes suitable for most mobile devices, and opens a discussion on fractal image models for limited resource applications.