Improved lossless compression of color-mapped images by an approximate solution of the traveling salesman problem

A color-mapped image is composed of a palette and an image of indices. The color of each pixel is the palette color referenced by the pixel's index. The indices image is usually far from being smooth. This affects its compressibility by lossless image compression methods, due to their reliance on the natural smoothness of images. The indices images can be smoothed by re-ordering the palette, ie, assigning the indices to the colors in a better way. We propose a new method for palette ordering based on an approximate solution of the traveling salesman problem. The proposed method has low complexity, dependent only on the size of the palette. It is found to significantly improve the compression ratios of color-mapped images coded with the JPEG-LS lossless compression standard. The resulting compression ratios are better than those achieved by the popular GIF image file format.