An ASIC implementation of Kohonen's map based colour image compression

This paper presents a new hardware design for a neural network based colour image compression. The compressed image consists of a colour palette containing few best colours and the coded image. Kohonen's map neural network is applied to construct the colour palette and the coded image, both forming the compressed image. The Kohonen's map based compression results in linear time complexity (in the size of the image). It is advantageous over traditional JPEG in colour quantization applications and compression of images with limited colours. The architecture of the hardware unit is based on single instruction multiple data methodology. The architecture has been implemented in an application specific integrated circuit and results show that the proposed design achieves high speed allowing inputs at a video rate for compression of images up to size of 512 × 512 with low area requirement. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.