Date of Award

8-2003

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Degree Program

Engineering

Department

Electrical Engineering

Major Professor

Charalampidis, Dimitrios

Second Advisor

Ioup, Juliette

Third Advisor

Riemer, Terry

Abstract

Images are forming an increasingly large part of modern communications, bringing the need for efficient and effective compression. Many techniques developed for this purpose include transform coding, vector quantization and neural networks. In this thesis, a new neural network method is used to achieve image compression. This work extends the use of 2-layer neural networks to a combination of cascaded networks with one node in the hidden layer. A redistribution of the gray levels in the training phase is implemented in a random fashion to make the minimization of the mean square error applicable to a broad range of images. The computational complexity of this approach is analyzed in terms of overall number of weights and overall convergence. Image quality is measured objectively, using peak signal-to-noise ratio and subjectively, using perception. The effects of different image contents and compression ratios are assessed. Results show the performance superiority of cascaded neural networks compared to that of fixedarchitecture training paradigms especially at high compression ratios. The proposed new method is implemented in MATLAB. The results obtained, such as compression ratio and computing time of the compressed images, are presented.

Rights

The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this dissertation or thesis in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation.

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