A novel high-quality YUV-based image coding technique for efficient image storage in portable electronic appliances

Current trends in the market of mobile display applications demonstrate the interest in increasing the quality of image representation in portable imaging devices. Due to the implementation constraints dictated by the display driver electronics, however, this makes the availability of efficient, low-cost, embedded image compression engines highly attractive. We propose a YUV-based image encoding strategy that combines the advantages of alternative popular image compression schemes. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method by measuring the associated compression PSNR to show that it is independent of the characteristics of the target image, which makes the technique capable of addressing a variety of display-based applications. We also provide implementation data to demonstrate that the effort of embedding our digital compressor within commercial display driver ASICs is negligible, while typical 10% saving in the total driver size can be achieved because of the on-chip memory reduction( Index Terms--mobile display, display driver, image coding, YUV.