Graph Based Cross-Channel Transform for Color Image Compression

Adaptive transform coding is gaining more and more attention for better mining of image content over fixed transforms such as discrete cosine transform (DCT). As a special case, graph transform learning establishes a novel paradigm for the graph-based transforms. However, there still exists a challenge for graph transform learning-based image codecs design on natural image compression, and graph representation cannot describe regular image samples well over graph-structured data. Therefore, in this article, we propose a cross-channel graph-based transform (CCGBT) for natural color image compression. We observe that neighboring pixels having similar intensities should have similar values in the chroma channels, which means that the prominent structure of the luminance channel is related to the contours of the chrominance channels. A collaborative design of the learned graphs and their corresponding distinctive transforms lies in the assumption that a sufficiently small block can be considered smooth, meanwhile, guaranteeing the compression of the luma and chroma signals at the cost of a small overhead for coding the description of the designed luma graph. In addition, a color image compression framework based on the CCGBT is designed for comparing DCT on the classic JPEG codec. The proposed method benefits from its flexible transform block design on arbitrary sizes to exploit image content better than the fixed transform. The experimental results show that the unified graph-based transform outperforms conventional DCT, while close to discrete wavelet transform on JPEG2000 at high bit-rates.