| 摘要 |
According to this invention, while the encoding efficiency of image data (e.g., a natural image) substantially maintains the conventional one, an image (e.g., a CG image or text document) having a small number of appearance colors is losslessly encoded at higher compression ratio. For this purpose, pixel data are input in the raster order and temporarily stored in a buffer. Pixel data at positions having undergone encoding are stored. A neighborhood matching determination unit generates first information representing whether a pixel having the same color as that of the pixel of interest exists in neighboring pixels <U STYLE="SINGLE">a, b, and c, and second information for specifying whether a pixel having the same color as that of the pixel of interest exists, and if the pixel having the same color exists, specifying the neighboring pixel. A pixel matching detection unit counts the number of colors contained in the neighboring pixels <U STYLE="SINGLE">a, b, and c, and generates information representing whether the number of colors is two or less, or three or less. On the basis of the first information and second information, a code generation unit outputs one or both of encoded data from a matched-pixel position encoding unit and prediction error encoding unit.
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