Image compression method for high-speed and high-quality image processing

摘要

The invention relates to lossless, near-lossless, and lossy compression and decompression of digital image data. Image data can be compressed and decompressed on-the-fly with no need for external RAM resources for temporary data storage while compressing/decompressing image data. Implementing the algorithm only requires a very limited amount od silicon and yields very high performance in relation to very low power consumption. The described implementation is optimized for raw image data from a sensor with a Bayer filter pattern but can be used on data from image sensors with any color filter. The compression algorithm contains a line indexing format which enables very fast subsampling of an already compressed image and the possibility to decompress only parts of an image - this improves performance and reduces the need for temporary RAM storage greatly when zooming and in postprocessing.