eXtended Color Cell Compression -- A Runtime-efficient Compression Scheme for Software Video

Multimedia applications require a compression and decompression scheme for digital video. The standardized and widely used techniques JPEG and MPEG provide very good compression ratios, but are computationally quite complex and demanding. We propose to use an extension to the much simpler Color Cell Compression scheme as an alternative. Our extension includes the use of variable block sizes, the reuse of color index values from previously encoded blocks, and Huffman encoding of the stream of blocks. We present experimental results showing that our scheme provides much better runtime performance than MPEG, at the cost of a slightly inferior compression ratio. It is thus especially suited for software videos in high-speed networks