Efficient colour image compression using fusion approach

The aim of image compression endeavour is to reduce the total data required to represent the image, which, in turn, decreases the demand of transmission bandwidth and storage space. In this work, we propose an image fusion based idea that can be exploited extensively to reduce the file size of JPEG compressed image further. Before performing the JPEG compression, we compute both intensity and a subsampled colour representation of the image undergoing compression. Then, similar to the JPEG compression, discrete cosine transformation, quantisation and entropy coding processes are applied on these images and stored in a single image file container. In the decoder, these two images are reconstructed and fused to obtain the resultant decoded image. Our experiments show that the proposed method does meet the lower storage and bandwidth requirement by reducing the average bits per pixel of the encoded image than that of the JPEG compressed image