Browser-friendly Hybrid Codec for Compound Image Compression

In this paper, we present a browser-friendly hybrid JPEG/PNG codec for compound images. First we employ a simple yet efficient block classification algorithm to identify the blocks to pictorial and textural ones. And then JPEG is used to encode the pictorial blocks and PNG is used for textual blocks. Our evaluation results show that our codec significantly outperforms JPEG and PNG in terms of rate-distortion performance, and also it outperforms JPEG, JPEG2000 and DjVu in terms of visual quality. Moreover, since JPEG and PNG are naturally supported by modern browsers, the coded images generated from our proposed coder can be natively supported by browsers and possible to be widely deployed in Web applications.