Construction and evaluation of a lossless image format, Carbonara

Abstract: High-speed laser triangulation 3D cameras, such as the Ranger3 from SICK, transmit image data to a PC for processing. The camera’s operational speed is constrained by the capabilities of the transmission link. By compressing the data, the bandwidth requirements of the camera is reduced. This thesis presents the development of a lossless image compression format developed for this purpose. The proposed image compression format features a single-pass encoder that utilizes run-length and delta encoding. It is designed to be suitable for implementation on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) within high-speed laser-scanning cameras. Furthermore, the format offers configurability through parameters, enabling optimization for diverse types of image data to achieve more efficient compression. The compression ratio of the image compression format was evaluated using a range oftypical images captured by a Ranger3 camera. The compression ratio was measured across different configurations of the format and subsequently compared with that of PNG. The compression ratio achieved by the proposed format is on par with that of the PNG format, despite having a much simpler encoding process.