Lossy compression of color images based on discrete Tchebichef transform

The Discrete cosine transform (DCT) plays an important role in image and video coding. It is used as the first step in lossy / lossless image compression. Consequently, many algorithms have been developed to efficiently compute it. In the image compression community, an alternative to the DCT, known as the discrete Tchebichef transform (DTT), is increasingly used. It possesses an excellent energy compaction property and a low implementation complexity. However, the DTT has not been investigated in the compression of color images. In this paper, the theory behind the DTT and its pruned version (PDTT) are investigated and a lossy compression method of color images based on the DTT is proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits almost the same performance as the DCT-based technique, in terms of objective measures such as the PSNR and SSIM while reducing the arithmetic complexity by more than 37%.