Galić et al. [33] have shown that compression based on edge-enhancing anisotropic diffusion (EED) can outperform the quality of JPEG for medium to high compression ratios when the interpolation points are chosen as vertices of an adaptive triangulation. However, the reasons for the good performance of EED remained unclear, and they could not outperform the more advanced JPEG 2000. The goals of the present paper are threefold: Firstly, we investigate the compression qualities of various partial differential equations. This sheds light on the favourable properties of EED in the context of image compression. Secondly, we demonstrate that it is even possible to beat the quality of JPEG 2000 with EED if one uses specific subdivisions on rectangles and several important optimisations. These amendments include improved entropy coding, brightness and diffusivity optimisation, and interpolation swapping. Thirdly, we demonstrate how to extend our approach to 3-D and shape data. Experiments on classical test images and 3-D medical data illustrate the high potential of our approach.

Edges provide semantically important image features. In this paper a lossy compression method for cartoon-like images is presented, which is based on edge information. Edges together with some adjacent grey/colour values are extracted and encoded using a classical edge detector, binary compression standards such as JBIG and stateof-the-art encoders such as PAQ. When decoding, information outside these encoded data is recovered by solving the Laplace equation, i.e. we inpaint with the steady state of a homogeneous diffusion process. For the discrete reconstruction problem, we prove existence and uniqueness and establish a maximum-minimum principle. Furthermore, we describe an efficient multigrid algorithm. The result is a simple codec that is able to encode and decode in real time. We show that for cartoon-like images this codec can outperform the JPEG standard and even its more advanced successor JPEG2000.

Abstract. Finding optimal inpainting data plays a key role in the field of image compression with partial differential equations (PDEs). In this paper, we optimise the spatial as well as the tonal data such that an image can be reconstructed with minimised error by means of discrete homogeneous diffusion inpainting. To optimise the spatial distribution of the inpainting data, we apply a probabilistic data sparsification followed by a nonlocal pixel exchange. Afterwards we optimise the grey values in these inpainting points in an exact way using a least squares approach. The resulting method allows almost perfect reconstructions with only 5% of all pixels. This demonstrates that a thorough data optimisation can compensate for most deficiencies of a suboptimal PDE interpolant.

Some recent methods for lossy signal and image compression store only a few selected pixels and fill in the missing structures by inpainting with a partial differential equation (PDE). Suitable operators include the Laplacian, the biharmonic operator, and edge-enhancing anisotropic diffusion (EED). The quality of such approaches depends substantially on the selection of the data that is kept. Optimising this data in the domain and codomain gives rise to challenging mathematical problems that shall be addressed in our work. In the 1D case, we prove results that provide insights into the difficulty of this problem, and we give evidence that a splitting into spatial and tonal (i.e. function value) optimisation does hardly deteriorate the results. In the 2D setting, we present generic algorithms that achieve a high reconstruction quality even if the specified data is very sparse. To optimise the spatial data, we use a probabilistic sparsification, followed by a nonlocal pixel exchange that avoids getting trapped in bad local optima. After this spatial optimisation we perform a tonal optimisation that modifies the function values in order to reduce the global reconstruction error. For homogeneous diffusion inpainting, this comes down to a least squares problem for which we prove that it has a unique solution. We demonstrate that it can be found efficiently with a gradient descent approach that is accelerated with fast explicit diffusion (FED) cycles. Our framework allows to specify the desired density of the inpainting mask a priori. Moreover, is more generic than other data optimisation approaches for the sparse inpainting problem, since it can also be extended to nonlinear inpainting operators such as EED. This is exploited to achieve reconstructions with state-of-the-art quality. Apart from these specific contributions, we also give an extensive literature survey on PDE-based image compression methods. Summary and ConclusionsThe contributions of our work are twofold: On the one hand we gave a comprehensive survey on the state-of-the-art in PDE-based image compression.

Abstract. It is well-known that edges contain semantically important image information. In this paper we present a lossy compression method for cartoon-like images that exploits information at image edges. These edges are extracted with the Marr-Hildreth operator followed by hysteresis thresholding. Their locations are stored in a lossless way using JBIG. Moreover, we encode the grey or colour values at both sides of each edge by applying quantisation, subsampling and PAQ coding. In the decoding step, information outside these encoded data is recovered by solving the Laplace equation, i.e. we inpaint with the steady state of a homogeneous diffusion process. Our experiments show that the suggested method outperforms the widely-used JPEG standard and can even beat the advanced JPEG2000 standard for cartoon-like images.