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Image Compression

Winter Term 2011 / 2012

Image Compression

Instructor: Christian Schmaltz
Examiner: Prof. Joachim Weickert

Winter Term 2011 / 2012
Lecture week (2h) with exercises (2h)

Lectures: Thursday 8-10 c.t., Building E1.3, Lecture Hall 3
Tutorials: Friday 14-16 c.t., Building E1.3, Seminar room 014

First lecture: Thursday, October 20, 2011.
First tutorial: Friday, October 28, 2011.


The registration was open from Thu, Oct. 20, 2011, 4 pm until Oct. 27, 2011, 2 pm.



AnnouncementsDescriptionEntrance requirementsExams Download



NEWS: The certificates are ready and can be fetched in room 111, building E2.4 (Geschaeftszimmer Mathematik, Frau Voss, opening hours for certificates: Mon-Fri 8.15-11.59 am).

The results of the second exam are now available.

The time and place of the re-exam have changed.

The results of the first exam are now available.

Due to sickness, the office hour, lecture, and the exercise group had to be canceled in the week from 28.11 to 02.12.

The registration is closed.

There was no office hour on Wednesday, Oct. 26 2011.

The course is designed as a supplement for image processing lectures, to be attended before, after or parallel to them.

After the lecture, participants should be able to understand the concepts used in different compression algorithms. We start with general-purpose entropy coding algorithms such as Huffman-coding or arithmetic coding, discuss adaptive and higher-order entropy coding algorithms, and talk about dictionary methods such as the method by Lempel, Ziv, and Welch (LZW).

Afterwards, we discuss image compression algorithms based on transformations (JPEG, JPEG 2000), as well as diffusion-based image compression algorithms before we give a glimpse on how video compression works.

Basic mathematics courses are recommended. Understanding English is necessary. Image processing lectures such as "Image Processing and Computer Vision" are helpful for some topics, but not necessary.


The homework assignments are intended to be solved at home and have to be submitted in the lecture break, or earlier. In order to qualify for the exam you must obtain 50% of the possible points on average.

Working in groups of up to 2 people is permitted, but both persons must be able to explain the solutions handed in.

The first written exam will take place on Thursday, February 9, 2012 from 8:00 to 10:00 am in building E1.3, lecture hall 2.
The second written exam will take place on Tuesday, April 10, 2012 from 2:00 to 4:00 pm in building E1.3, lecture hall 1.

These are some of the rules during the exams:

  • For the exams, you can use the lecture slides, the example solutions, and hand-written notes, but neither books nor any other printed material (except for a dictionary).
  • Pocket calculators are not allowed.
  • Mobile phones, PDAs, laptops and other electronic devices have to be turned off.
  • Please keep the student ID card ready for an attendance check during the exam.
  • Solutions that are written with pencil will not be graded.

It might be advisable to bring a ruler and a coloured pencil.

The results of the first written exam can be found here, and the corresponding distribution of points and grades here (Updated on 17.02).

The following thresholds were applied to determine the grades:

  • 1.0 : 91 - 54 points
  • 1.3 : 53 - 52
  • 1.7 : 51 - 50
  • 2.0 : 49 - 48
  • 2.3 : 47 - 46
  • 2.7 : 45 - 44
  • 3.0 : 43 - 42
  • 3.3 : 41 - 40
  • 3.7 : 39 - 38
  • 4.0 : 37 - 36
  • 5.0 : 35 - 0

You can inspect your exam sheets on Friday, February 17, 14:00-15:00, building E1.1, room 3.06 (3rd floor).



The results of the second written exam can be found here, and the corresponding distribution of points and grades here.

You can inspect your exam sheets on Friday, April 13, 14:00-14:30, building E1.7, room 4.07 (4rd floor).

The following thresholds were applied to determine the grades of the second exam:

  • 1.0 : 61 - 50 points
  • 1.3 : 49 - 47
  • 1.7 : 46 - 44
  • 2.0 : 43 - 41
  • 2.3 : 40 - 39
  • 2.7 : 38 - 37
  • 3.0 : 36 - 34
  • 3.3 : 33 - 32
  • 3.7 : 31 - 30
  • 4.0 : 29 - 27
  • 5.0 : 26 - 0

There is no specific book that covers the complete content of this class. However, each of the following books covers several of the topics discussed in the lecture:

  • T. Strutz: Bilddatenkompression. Vieweg+Teubner (in German)
  • D. Hankerson, G. A. Harris, and P. D. Johnson, Jr.: Introduction to Information Theory and Data Compression. Chapman & Hall/CRC
  • K. Sayood: Introduction to Data Compression. Morgan Kaufmann

These books are available in the "Semesterapparat" in the library, see here .
Further references will be given during the lecture.


Participants of the course can download the lecture materials here after the lecture (access is password-protected). However, be aware that these slides are only provided to support the classroom teaching, not to replace it. Additional organisational information, such as examples and explanations that may be helpful or necessary to understand the content of the course (and thus relevant for the exam), will be provided in the lectures. It is solely your responsibility - not ours - to make sure that you receive this infomation. The topics given here are preliminary and will probably change slightly.

No. Title Date
1 Introduction and Basic Concepts
(Notice the updated slide 5)
October 20
2 Theoretical Background I
(Fixed a typo on slide 9)
October 27
3 Theoretical Background and Entropy Coders
(08.02: Fixed formula on slide 17)
November 3
4 Entropy Coders II
(16.11: Added a remark on slide 24)
November 10
5 Arithmetic Coding I
(24.11: Added remark on slides 7 and 23)
November 17
6 Arithmetic Coding II and Adaptive Entropy Coding November 24
6a Repetition December 1
7 Higher Order Coding, RLE, BWT, MTF, and Bzip2 December 8
8 Coding with Dictionaries
(15.12: Updated last exercise)
(08.02: Clarified slides 9 and 23)
December 15
9 Image Compression I: PNG, JPEG-LS, and JBIG
(05.01: Updated exercise!
09.01: Fixed a typo in the third exercise)
December 22
10 Image Compression II: JPEG and JPEG 2000 January 12
11 Fractal Image Compression and Diffusion-based Inpainting
(26.01: Fixed an error in an example on slide 3, and changed exercises accordingly)
January 19
12 Diffusion-based Image Compression January 26
13 Video Compression February 2
Exam February 9


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