Progressive Ziv-Lempel encoding of synthetic images

Summary form only given. We describe an algorithm that gives a progression of compressed versions of a single image. Each stage of the progression is a lossy compression of the image, with the distortion decreasing in each stage, until the last image is losslessly compressed. Both compressor and decompressor make use of earlier stages to significantly improve the compression of later stages of the progression. Our algorithm uses vector quantization to improve the distortion at the beginning of the progression, and adapts Ziv and Lempel's algorithm to make it efficient for progressive encoding.