Lossless Text Image Compression using Two Dimensional Run Length Encoding

Text images are used in many types of conventional data communication where texts are not directly represented by digital character such as ASCII but represented by an image, for instance facsimile file or scanned documents. We propose a combination of Run Length Encoding (RLE) and Huffman coding for two dimensional binary image compression namely 2DRLE. Firstly, each row in an image is read sequentially. Each consecutive recurring row is kept once and the number of occurrences is stored. Secondly, the same procedure is performed column-wise to the image produced by the first stage to obtain an image without consecutive recurring row and column. The image from the last stage is then compressed using Huffman coding. The experiment shows that the 2DRLE achieves a higher compression ratio than conventional Huffman coding for image by achieving more than 8:1 of compression ratio without any distortion.