Image Compression using Run Length Encoding and its Optimisation

Images are among the most common and popular representations of data. Digital images are used for professional and personal use ranging from official documents to social media. Thus, any Organization or individual needs to store and share a large number of images. One of the most common issues associated with using images is the potentially large file-size of the image. Advancements in image acquisition technology and an increase in the popularity of digital content means that images now have very high resolutions and high quality, inevitably leading to an increase in size. Image compression has become one of the most important parts of image processing these days due to this. The goal is to achieve the least size possible for an image while not compromising on the quality of the image, that gives us the perfect balance. Therefore, to achieve this perfect balance many compression techniques have been devised and it is not possible to pinpoint the best one because it is really dependent on the type of image to be compressed. So here we are going to elaborate on converting images into binary images and the Run length Encoding (RLE) algorithm used for compressing binary images. Now, RLE is itself a very effective and simple approach for compression of images but, sometimes, the size of an image actually increases after RLE algorithm is applied to the image and this is one of the major drawbacks of RLE. In this research paper we are going to propose an extension or maybe an upgradation to RLE method which will ensure that the size of an image never exceeds beyond its original size, even in the worst possible scenario.