Microsoft Word - icme2004-bvq2.DOC

In this paper, a new technique for lossy compression of halftone images is proposed based on the vector quantization technique. A conventional vector quantization encoder is modified such that it embeds a block-based error diffusion process and takes a HVS model into account during the compression. This modification significantly improves the visual performance of encoded images while the compression ratio achieved is identical to that of vector quantization.