Image Compression Based on Compressive Sensing: End-to-End Comparison With JPEG

Abstract

We present an end-to-end image compression system based on compressive sensing. The presented system integrates the conventional scheme of compressive sampling (on the entire image) and reconstruction with quantization and entropy coding. The compression performance, in terms of decoded image quality versus data rate, is shown to be comparable with JPEG and significantly better at the low rate range. We study the parameters that influence the system performance, including (i) the choice of sensing matrix, (ii) the trade-off between quantization and compression ratio, and (iii) the reconstruction algorithms. We propose an effective method to select, among all possible combinations of quantization step and compression ratio, the ones that yield the near-best quality at any given bit rate. Furthermore, our proposed image compression system can be directly used in the compressive sensing camera, e.g., the single pixel camera, to construct a hardware compressive sampling system.