LICO: An Effective, High-Speed, Lossless Compressor for Images

Due to the large and growing number of photographs taken with progressively higher resolution, the volume of image data being generated, stored, and processed increases steadily. Compressing images losslessly is important for enhancing storage efficiency, expediting transmission, and reducing energy consumption while preserving image quality. This paper presents LICO, a new lossless compression algorithm for color images. On the 30 CLIC’24 images, our serial and parallel implementations of LICO deliver a compression speed that is 13× to 46× and a decompression speed that is 14× to 135× higher than JPEG2000. Furthermore, LICO is both faster and compresses more than PNG, TIFF, BZIP2, GZIP, and Zstandard.