A New Lossless Gray Level Image Representation

Although the quadtree has many merits in image representation and image processing, its compactness is impaired by the excessive emphasis on the symmetry of segmentations. In this paper, a lossless gray level image representation, titled Overlapped Rectangle Image Representation (ORIR), is presented. The ORIR has removed the constraint of the symmetric segmentations and is capable of coding some detached pixels by using a single rectangle. These characteristics have made the ORIR a highly compact representation. The theoretical analyses and the experimental results in this paper show that the ORIR is greatly superior to the linear quadtree in the aspect of the memory efficiency.