A comparison of prediction schemes proposed for a new lossless image compression standard

It has long been realized that the current JPEG standard does not provide state-of-the-art performance in its lossless mode. In view of this, the International Standards Organization (ISO) recently solicited proposals for a new lossless/nearly lossless compression standard for continuous-tone still images. A total of nine proposals were submitted in the summer of 1995. Seven of these used a prediction step for 'decorrelating' the image prior to modelling and encoding. In this paper we investigate the efficacy of the different prediction schemes that were proposed. We also discuss their computational complexity and the price/performance trade-offs that emerge from our study.