JPEG2000 compliant lossless coding of floating point data

Abstract

Summary form only given. Many scientific applications require that image data be stored in floating point format due to the large dynamic range of the data. These applications pose a problem if the data needs to be compressed since modern image compression standards, such as JPEG2000, are only defined to operate on fixed point or integer data. This paper proposes straightforward extensions to the JPEG2000 image compression standard which allow for the efficient coding of floating point data. The extensions are based on the idea of representing floating point values as "extended integers", and these extensions maintain desirable properties of JPEG2000, such as scalable embedded bit streams and rate distortion optimality. Like JPEG2000, the proposed methods can be applied to both lossy and lossless compression. However, the discussion in this paper focuses on, and the test results are limited to, the lossless case. Test results show that one of the proposed lossless methods improve upon the compression ratio of standard methods such as gzip by an average of 16%.