Patent ID: 7305174

Claim:
One or more computer-readable media comprising instruction that, when executed, direct a computing system to: (a) divide an image into a plurality of regions; (b) for each region (i) select a plurality of adjacent pixels corresponding to the same color component, wherein said selected pixels from a particular region form a pixel sample set, and wherein corresponding pixel sample sets from said plurality of regions form a group, (ii) for each selected pixel, encode a pixel value of said selected pixel to generate a fixed length token and a variable length token, (iii) associate said variable length tokens for each pixel value in said pixel sample set to form a variable length token vector, and (iv) arrange bits of said fixed length tokens to associate each bit of a pixel value with corresponding bits of other pixels values within said pixel sample set to form a fixed length token vector for each bit position of said fixed length tokens; (c) for each group (i) form a first bit stream including said variable length token vector of each of said plurality of regions, and (ii) form a second bit stream including said fixed length token vectors of each of said plurality of regions, (d) form a primary bit stream of constant length and if required, a supplemental bit stream of inconstant length, wherein both bit streams may include said first and second bit streams corresponding to each of said groups; and (e) repeat steps (b)-(d) for a next pixel sample set selected from each region until the pixels of each of said plurality of regions have been encoded and added to said primary bit stream and said supplemental bit stream.