An Effective Algorithm and Architecture for the High-Throughput Lossless Compression of High-Resolution Images

This paper proposes a high-throughput lossless image-compression algorithm based on Golomb-Rice coding and its hardware architecture. The proposed solution increases compression ratios (CRs) while preserving the throughput by taking advantage of a novel parallel variable-length sign coding (PVSC) algorithm that reduces the sign bits to achieve a higher CR. In addition, the proposed solution adopts and modifies the two existing compression algorithms to improve the overall compression performance. The experimental results show that the proposed solution yields an average CR of 3.12, which is higher than those achieved with the previous algorithms. The hardware implementation of the proposed solution for an 8x8 block unit achieves a throughput of 18 GBps and 24 GBps when encoding and decoding, respectively. This hardware performance is enough to handle 7680 x 4320@240-Hz image processing.