Adaptive coding of DCT coefficients by Golomb-Rice codes

In this paper we apply some of the Golomb-Rice coding techniques that emerged in JPEG-LS, a new standard for lossless image compression, and apply them towards coding DCT coefficients in the lossy JPEG baseline algorithm. We show that this results in significant improvements in performance with limited impact on computational complexity. In fact, one significant reduction in complexity provided by the proposed techniques is the complete elimination of the Huffman tables in JPEG baseline which can be a bottleneck in hardware implementations. We give simulation results, comparing the performance of the proposed technique to JPEG baseline, JPEG baseline with optimal Huffman coding (two pass) and JPEG arithmetic.