Microshift: An Efficient Image Compression Algorithm for Hardware
In this paper, we propose a lossy image compression algorithm called Microshift. We employ an algorithm-hardware co-design methodology, yielding a hardware-friendly compression approach with low power consumption. In our method, the image is first micro-shifted, and then the sub-quantized values are further compressed. Two methods, FAST and MRF models, are proposed to recover the bit-depth by exploiting the spatial correlation of natural images. Both methods can decompress images progressively. On average, our compression algorithm can compress images to 1.25-bits per pixel with a resulting quality that outperforms the state-of-the-art on-chip compression algorithms in both peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity. Then, we propose a hardware architecture and implement the algorithm on an FPGA. The results on the ASIC design further validate the low-hardware complexity and high-power efficiency, showing that our method is promising, particularly for low-power wireless vision sensor networks.
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