Multidimensional incremental parsing for universal source coding.

A multidimensional incremental parsing algorithm (MDIP) for multidimensional discrete sources, as a generalization of the Lempel-Ziv coding algorithm, is investigated. It consists of three essential component schemes, maximum decimation matching, hierarchical structure of multidimensional source coding, and dictionary augmentation. As a counterpart of the longest match search in the Lempel-Ziv algorithm, two classes of maximum decimation matching are studied. Also, an underlying behavior of the dictionary augmentation scheme for estimating the source statistics is examined. For an m-dimensional source, m augmentative patches are appended into the dictionary at each coding epoch, thus requiring the transmission of a substantial amount of information to the decoder. The property of the hierarchical structure of the source coding algorithm resolves this issue by successively incorporating lower dimensional coding procedures in the scheme. In regard to universal lossy source coders, we propose two distortion functions, the local average distortion and the local minimax distortion with a set of threshold levels for each source symbol. For performance evaluation, we implemented three image compression algorithms based upon the MDIP; one is lossless and the others are lossy. The lossless image compression algorithm does not perform better than the Lempel-Ziv-Welch coding, but experimentally shows efficiency in capturing the source structure. The two lossy image compression algorithms are implemented using the two distortion functions, respectively. The algorithm based on the local average distortion is efficient at minimizing the signal distortion, but the images by the one with the local minimax distortion have a good perceptual fidelity among other compression algorithms. Our insights inspire future research on feature extraction of multidimensional discrete sources.