Personal photo album compression and management

Abstract

The advance in multimedia technologies have resulted in an explosive growth of pictures in personal computers and in cloud. Typically many pictures taken in the same occasion are similar. The cost to store and transmit them can be very significant. Thus it is important to find an efficient method to store these pictures. This paper proposed a compression scheme for similar images. Our approach is to arrange all the similar images into tree structure then apply video coding technique along each branch. To maximize the inter-image correlation between adjacent photos, we consider the minimum spanning tree (MST) subjecting to a maximum depth limit to ensure fast access to all images. This structure is encoded by the latest video coding technique High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), which is reported to has advantage in high definition video/image compression. It also supports deleting, adding and modifying images. Experiments show that the proposed method saved 75% space comparing to JPEG format.