Adaptive intercolor error prediction coder for lossless color (RGB) picture compression

Most of the current lossless compression algorithms, including the new international baseline JPEG-LS algorithm, do not exploit the interspectral correlations that exist between the color planes in an input color (RGB) picture. To improve the compression performance (i.e., lower the bit rate) it is necessary to exploit these correlations. A major concern is to find efficient methods for exploiting the correlations that, at the same time, are compatible with and can be incorporated into the JPEG-LS algorithm. One such algorithm is the method of intercolor error prediction (IEP), which when used with the JPEG-LS algorithm, results on average in a reduction of 8% in the overall bit rate. We show how the IEP algorithm can be simply modified and that it nearly doubles the size of the reduction in bit rate to 15%.