A preprocessing technique for improving the compression performance of JPEG 2000 for images with sparse or locally sparse histograms

JPEG 2000 is one of the most efficient and well performing standards for continuous-tone natural images compression. However, a compression performance loss may occur when encoding images with sparse or locally sparse histograms. Images of the later type include only a subset of the available intensity values implied by the nominal alphabet. This article proposes a new adaptive block-based histogram packing which improves the lossless compression performance of JPEG 2000 with sparse histogram images. We take advantage, in this work, of the strength likelihood between symbol sets of the neighboring image blocks and the efficiency of the offline histogram packing with sparse or locally sparse histogram images. Results of its effectiveness with JPEG 2000 are presented.