Clustering-Based Quantisation for PDE-Based Image Compression

Abstract

Optimal known pixel data for inpainting in compression codecs based on partial differential equations is real-valued and thereby expensive to store. Thus, quantisation is required for efficient encoding. In this paper, we interpret the quantisation step as a clustering problem. Due to the global impact of each known pixel and correlations between spatial and tonal data, we investigate the central question, which kind of feature vectors should be used for clustering with popular strategies such as k-means. Our findings show that the number of colours can be reduced significantly without impacting the reconstruction quality. Surprisingly, these benefits are negated by an increased coding cost in compression applications.