Color Image Coding by Colorization Approach

This paper proposes a new color image coding scheme called "colorization image coding." The scheme is based on the colorization technique which can colorize a monochrome image by giving a small number of color pixels. We develop algorithms useful for color image coding. First, the luminance component is separated from an input color image. Then, a small number of color seeds are selected as chrominance information. The luminance image component is coded by a lossy coding technique and the chrominance image component is stored as color seeds. The decoding is performed by the colorization algorithm. It is shown that this colorization technique is effective to image coding, especially for high compression rate, through the experiments using different types of images. Copyright (C) 2008 T. Horiuchi and S. Tominaga.