A unified framework for lossless image set compression

Summary form only given. This paper presents a framework to effectively compress sets of images in a lossless manner. An image set is represented as a graph and its minimum spanning tree is computed to decide which images and differences to encode. The Centroid scheme and the previous MST scheme can both be represented as a spanning tree in our graph. Thus, the scheme is guaranteed to be no worse than these previous schemes. In fact, the framework provides the best lossless compression for all schemes that consider interimage redundancy between two images in a set. Experimental results show that the new MST method always produces the best result regardless of the properties of the image sets. In some cases, the first-order entropy of the image set using our scheme results in a 29% improvement over the traditional scheme of compressing each image individually.