Image compression techniques using Local Binary Pattern

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach in image compression based on Local Binary Pattern (LBP). LBP has already been used as a simple texture descriptor, labeling the image pixels by looking at the points surrounding a central point (usually on a 3×3 neighborhood) and examining whether these neighbors' color values are greater or less than the central point and accordingly assigning a binary value to the corresponding bit. The description of image's local pattern results in an eight-bit binary description, but in order to restore the image from such a LBP description, the value of each central pixel is also needed. These two pieces of information, i.e. the LBP description and the actual original value for each local neighborhood central pixel, are stored in a newly proposed Local Binary Compressed format, denoted .LBC, from which the image can be reconstructed by employing statistical methods, i.e. generating smaller or larger sets of random numbers to fill in the missing information within each local neighborhood, based on the LBP descriptor. Two statistical distributions were tested and, apart from the compression performance, a Structural Similarity Index Metric was used to evaluate the results.