The lossless DCT for combined lossy/lossless image coding

This paper introduces a modification of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) that produces integer coefficients from which the original image data can be reconstructed losslessly. It describes an embedded coding scheme which incorporates this lossless DCT and presents some experimental rate-distortion curves for this scheme. The results show that the lossless compression ratio of the proposed scheme exceeds that of the lossless JPEG predictive coding scheme. On the other hand, in lossy operation the rate-distortion curve of the proposed scheme is very close to that of lossy JPEG. Also, the transform coefficients of the proposed scheme can be decoded with the ordinary DCT at the expense of a small error, which is only significant in lossless operation.