4.9 JPEG-LS

As has been mentioned in Section 4.8.5, the lossless mode of JPEG is inefficient and often is not even implemented. As a result, the ISO, in cooperation with the IEC, has decided to develop a new standard for the lossless (or near-lossless) compression of continuous-tone images. The result is recommendation ISO/IEC CD 14495, popularly known as JPEG-LS. The principles of this method are described here, but it should be noted that it is not simply an extension or a modification of JPEG. This is a new method, designed to be simple and fast. It does not use the DCT, does not employ arithmetic coding, and uses quantization in a restricted way, and only in its near-lossless option. JPEG-LS is based on ideas developed in [Weinberger et al. 96 and 00] and for their LOCO-I compression method. JPEG-LS examines several of the previously-seen neighbors of the current pixel, uses them as the context of the pixel, uses the context to predict the pixel and to select a probability distribution out of several such distributions, and uses that distribution to encode the prediction error with a special Golomb code. There is also a run mode, where the length of a run of identical pixels is encoded.

The context used to predict the current pixel x is shown in Figure 4.70. The encoder examines the context pixels and decides whether to encode the current pixel x in the run mode or in the regular mode. If...