Patent ID: 7711195

Claim:
A method for encoding raw image data into a compressed digital image representation, said method comprising: in arbitrary order reading image blocks of a specified size of the raw image data, and for each image block: transforming the image block into one or more data units of one or more components, said transforming creating a representation of each data unit as coefficients of basis functions, calculating a quantized approximation of said coefficients, representing at least some of the quantized coefficients as a stream of coefficients of sequential image blocks, Huffman-coding said stream of coefficients, wherein a zeroth order coefficient is represented as a difference to a previous zeroth order coefficient of the corresponding component, storing said Huffman-coded stream of coefficients in a bitstream, storing in a block information table indicators to one zeroth order or first order coefficient of each image block in the bitstream, storing in the block information table information indicating the number of bits in the bitstream between coefficients of zeroth or first order in adjacent data units of the image block, and storing in the block information table the zeroth order coefficient of at least one data unit of each component, said zeroth order coefficient being represented in a non-differential form.