Two dimensional incremental parsing for image compression

The one-dimensional incremental parsing rule, which is used in the Lempel-Ziv universal compression, is extended to that of two dimension in this paper. And its three essential component schemes, a hierarchical structure for two-dimensional source coding, dictionary augmentation, and maximum decimation matching, are addressed. To design an approximate pattern matching algorithm, two types of distortion functions, local average distortion and local minimax distortion, with noise visibility thresholds are given. We have compared our algorithm to existing lossy data compression algorithms based on pattern matching schemes, and demonstrated its superiority both in minimizing signal distortion and in maximizing perceptual quality.