VaFLE: Value flag length encoding for images in a multithreaded environment

Abstract

The Run Length Encoding (RLE) algorithm substitutes long runs of identical symbols with the value of that symbol followed by the binary representation of the frequency of occurrences of that value. This lossless technique is effective for encoding images where many consecutive pixels have similar intensity values. One of the major problems of RLE for encoding runs of bits is that the encoded runs have their lengths represented as a fixed number of bits in order to simplify decoding. The number of bits assigned is equal to the number required to encode the maximum length run, which results in the addition of padding bits on runs whose lengths do not require as many bits for representation as the maximum length run. Due to this, the encoded output sometimes exceeds the size of the original input, especially for input data where in the runs can have a wide range of sizes. In this paper, we propose VaFLE, a general-purpose lossless data compression algorithm, where the number of bits allocated for representing the length of a given run is a function of the length of the run itself. The total size of an encoded run is independent of the maximum run length of the input data. In order to exploit the inherent data parallelism of RLE, VaFLE was also implemented in a multithreaded OpenMP environment. Our algorithm guarantees better compression rates of upto 3X more than standard RLE. The parallelized algorithm attains a speedup as high as 5X in grayscale and 4X in color images compared to the RLE approach. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2019.