Lossy Infrared Image Compression Based on Wavelet Coefficient Probability Modeling and Run-Length-Enhanced Huffman Coding

Infrared line-scanning images have high redundancy and large file sizes. In JPEG2000 compression, the MQ arithmetic encoder's complexity slows down processing. Huffman coding can achieve O(1) complexity based on a code table, but its integer-bit encoding mechanism and ignorance of the continuity of symbol distribution result in suboptimal compression performance. In particular, when encoding sparse quantized wavelet coefficients that contain a large number of consecutive zeros, the inaccuracy of the one-bit shortest code accumulates, reducing compression efficiency. To address this, this paper proposes Huf-RLC, a Huffman-based method enhanced with Run-Length Coding. By leveraging zero-run continuity, Huf-RLC optimizes the shortest code encoding, reducing the average code length to below one bit in sparse distributions. Additionally, this paper proposes a wavelet coefficient probability model to avoid the complexity of calculating statistics for constructing Huffman code tables for different wavelet subbands. Furthermore, Differential Pulse Code Modulation (DPCM) is introduced to address the remaining spatial redundancy in the low-frequency wavelet subband. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms JPEG in terms of PSNR and SSIM, while maintaining minimal performance loss compared to JPEG2000. Particularly at low bitrates, the proposed method shows only a small gap with JPEG2000, while JPEG suffers from significant blocking artifacts. Additionally, the proposed method achieves compression speeds 3.155 times faster than JPEG2000 and 2.049 times faster than JPEG.