Today, the use of iris recognition is expanding globally as the most accurate and reliable biometric feature in terms of uniqueness and robustness. The motivation for the reduction or compression of the large databases of iris images becomes an urgent requirement. In general, image compression is the process to remove the insignificant or redundant information from the image details, that implicitly makes efficient use of redundancy embedded within the image itself. In addition, it may exploit human vision or perception limitations to reduce the imperceptible information.
This paper deals with reducing the size of image, namely reducing the number of bits required in representing the image. This was performed by exploiting the transforms-based coding techniques of lossless base compression system. In these techniques, the first part looked at the traditional Fourier transform coding technique while the second part aimed at enhancing the performance of the traditional transformation techniques. This was achieved once by overcoming the inherited problems of this technique that suffers from the complex nature base, then latter by incorporating the double base coding techniques of hierarchal scheme, as mixing of both discrete wavelet transform and zipper coding techniques.
The test results indicated that the proposed scheme produced high compression ratio with identically preserving the quality of the compressed (decoded) image.