Anisotropic diffusion as a preprocessing step for efficient image compression

Abstract

Anisotropic diffusion is an image enhancement method. It is a nonlinear process which removes noise and irrelevant details while preserving the edges, i.e. it "extracts" the essential visual information. The paper proposes a useful application of anisotropic diffusion in image data compression. We argue that for high compression an anisotropic diffusion preprocessing results in better quality of the decoded image.