Least-squares mesh model for image compression

Abstract

In this work we explore the use of a content-adaptive mesh model for image compression. We first model the image to be compressed by a quadtree mesh representation, in which the nodal values are determined using a least squares fit. The resulting mesh structure is coded using a 4-ary tree and the mesh nodal values are coded using a hierarchical predictive coding scheme. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve good compression performance and can significantly outperform JPEG both subjectively and objectively in low bit-rate applications.