Lossless JPEG - JPEG-LS

JPEG-LS is a lossless/near-lossless compression standard for continuous-tone images. Its official designation is ISO-14495-1/ITU-T.87. It is a simple and efficient baseline algorithm which consists of two independent and distinct stages called modeling and encoding. JPEG-LS was developed with the aim of providing a low-complexity lossless and near-lossless image compression standard that could offer better compression efficiency than lossless JPEG. It was developed because at the time, the Huffman coding-based JPEG lossless standard and other standards were limited in their compression performance. Total decorrelation cannot be achieved by first order entropy of the prediction residuals employed by these inferior standards. JPEG-LS, on the other hand, can obtain good decorrelation. Part 1 of this standard was finalized in 1999; and when released, Part 2 of this standard will introduce extensions such as arithmetic coding. The core of JPEG-LS is based on the LOCO-I algorithm, that relies on prediction, residual modeling and context-based coding of the residuals. Most of the low complexity of this technique comes from the assumption that prediction residuals follow a two-sided geometric distribution (also called a discrete Laplace distribution) and from the use of Golomb-like codes, which are known to be approximately optimal for geometric distributions. Besides lossless compression, JPEG-LS also provides a lossy mode ("near-lossless") where the maximum absolute error can be controlled by the encoder. Compression for JPEG-LS is generally much faster than JPEG 2000 and much better than the original lossless JPEG standard.