A compression method for storing a sequence of images

A compression method for a single image has been developed successfully. Many applications, such as digital medical imaging, video on demand, and scientific visualization, involve not only a single image but also a sequence of images to derive more information. There are many overlapping parts among a sequence of images. These overlapping parts can be stored only once. It is a good idea to reduce storage space for storing a sequence of images. The overlapping quadtree is a representation with that idea. It has two major drawbacks: only bilevel images can be represented and dramatic storage space is occupied by pointers. In this paper, a new coding scheme is proposed to eliminate these disadvantages. Multi-level images can be represented by the new method and pointers are removed from the new representation. Therefore the representation capacity has been extended and its compression ratio has also been improved.