An architectural design for parallel fractal compression

Fractal image compression has many features that makes it a powerful compression scheme, but it has been mainly restricted to archival storage due to its time consuming encoding algorithm. In this paper, we take a known quad-tree fractal encoding algorithm and design an ASIC parallel image processing array that can encode reasonably sized gray-scale images in real-time. In designing this architecture, we include novel optimizations that result in speed improvements at the algorithmic, architectural, and circuit levels.