A fixed-length compression method using the Karhunen-Loeve transform

A compression method is presented which combines the distinct advantage of being fixed length with the visual picture quality of transform-based coding methods. This method compresses the Karhunen-Loeve transform coefficients of 8/spl times/8 pixel blocks of the picture and attains a compression ratio of 15.37:1 for color images. Compared to the absolute moment block truncation coding, the other known fixed length compression method, our method improves the compression ratio by 68% and significantly improves the visual quality of the reconstructed picture.