Efficient chain-code encoding for segmentation-based image compression

Summary form only given. This paper presents a new and efficient method of encoding uniform image regions and lines. Regions and lines are obtained as the result of image segmentation, split and merge image compression, or as the output of line and polygon drawing algorithms. Lines and contours of uniform regions are encoded using chain-code. The chain-code is obtained in a way that is efficient with respect to bit-rate and produces lossless contour and line encoding. A lossy method for contour encoding is also presented. A set of experiments to compare the performance of traditional chain-code contour encoding with the improved contour encoding is presented. The results show a reduction of about 50% in the bit-rate with no reconstruction error.