In this research, a new technique is suggested to reduce the long time required by the encoding process by using modified moment features on domain blocks. The modified moment features were used in accelerating the matching step of the Iterated Function System (IFS). The main disadvantage facing the fractal image compression (FIC) method is the over-long encoding time needed for checking all domain blocks and choosing the least error to get the best matched domain for each block of ranges. In this paper, we develop a method that can reduce the encoding time of FIC by reducing the size of the domain pool based on the moment features of domain blocks, followed by a comparison with threshold (the selected threshold based on experience is 0.0001). The experiment was conducted on three images with size of 512x512 pixel, resolution of 8 bits/pixel, and different block size (4x4, 8x8 and, 16x16 pixels). The resulted encoding time (ET) values achieved by the proposed method were 41.53, 39.06, and 38.16 sec, respectively, for boat , butterfly, and house images of block size 4x4 pixel. These values were compared with those obtained by the traditional algorithm for the same images with the same block size, which were 1073.85, 1102.66, and 1084.92 sec, respectively. The results imply that the proposed algorithm could remarkably reduce the ET of the images in comparison with the traditional algorithm.
