Lossless compression

Here are two examples of lossless image compression.

Run-length encoding

RLE (run-length encoding) replaces a sequence of pixels of the same color with the number of pixels in that sequence. Therefore, the image Fig. 36 needs 9 bytes to be stored without any compression. By reading the image column after column, the bytes are:

\[ \begin{pmatrix} 0 & 0 & 0 & 255 & 255 & 255 & 255 & 128 & 128 \end{pmatrix}. \]

Fig. 36 A 3 × 3 image.

We see 3 pixels with intensity 0, 4 pixels with intensity 255, and 2 pixels with intensity 128. Thus the image is encoded in RLE with only 6 bytes:

\[ \begin{pmatrix} 3 & 0 & 4 & 255 & 2 & 128 \end{pmatrix}. \]

In this example, the compression rate is 6/9 = 2/3.

In computers, the BMP format is based on RLE compression.

Lempel-Ziv-Welch Algorithm

The LZW algorithm (Lempel-Ziv-Welch, 1984) is an improvement of the LZ78 algorithm (1978). It is used in format like GIF or TIFF. Briefly speaking, the principle is to build a dictionary where the “words” are groups of pixels and to assign a code to each group. The dictionary is build during the compression stage and depends on the image.