Exploiting redundant bit combinations in a compressed representation of an image

Abstract

Block compression schemes used for image compression are susceptible to generating image blocks having redundant bit sets (i.e. a redundant bit combination), where one of the bit sets in the block is not meaningfully different from the other bit set in the block. As a result, one of the bit sets will be meaningless to a decompression scheme used to decompress the image and thus will not contribute to improving a quality of the decompressed image. The present disclosure provides a technique to exploit redundant bit combinations in a compressed representation of an image, including to exploit more than just the simple case of bit sets that are identical. Exploiting a redundant bit combination will allow an otherwise meaningless bit set to be used for some other discriminating purpose, which can allow for a higher image quality after decompression.