PECSI: a Practical Perceptually-Enhanced Compression Framework for Still Images

This paper presents PECSI, a perceptually-enhanced image compression framework designed to provide high compression rates for still images while preserving visual quality. PECSI utilizes important human perceptual characteristics during image encoding stages (e.g. downsampling and quantization) and image decoding stages (e.g. upsampling and deblocking) to find a better balance between image compression and the perceptual quality of an image. The proposed framework is computationally efficient and easy to integrate into existing block-based still image compression standards. Experimental results show that the PECSI framework provides improved perceptual quality at the same compression rate as existing still image compression methods. Alternatively, the framework can be used to achieve higher compression ratios while maintaining the same level of perceptual quality.