Fractal color compression in the L*a*b* uniform color space

Summary form only given. We present comparative results obtained in the context of 24-bit true color image encoding by using searchless vs. search-based fractal compression techniques in a perceptually uniform color space. A pixel in the color space is represented as a vector with each component corresponding to a color channel. The least squares approximation of an image block by an iterated function system (IFS) is adapted to reflect the added color dimensions. To account for the nonlinearity of the human visual perception, compression in the L/sup */a/sup */b/sup */ uniform color space is proposed. In this color space, two pairs of colors with the same Euclidean distance metric are perceptually almost equally similar or different.