Context: Image compression is one of the key and important applicationsin commercial, research, defence and medical fields. The largerimage files cannot be processed or stored quickly and efficiently. Hencecompressing images while maintaining the maximum quality possibleis very important for real-world applications.

Objectives: Lossy compression is widely popular for image compressionand used in commercial applications. In order to perform efficientwork related to images, the quality in many situations needs to be highwhile having a comparatively low file size. Hence lossless compressionalgorithms are used in this study to compare the lossless algorithmsand to check which algorithm makes the compression retaining thequality with decent compression ratio.

Method: The lossless algorithms compared are LZW, RLE, Huffman,DCT in lossless mode, DWT. The compression techniques areimplemented in MATLAB by using image processing toolbox. Thecompressed images are compared for subjective image quality. The imagesare compressed with emphasis on maintaining the quality ratherthan focusing on diminishing file size.

Result: The LZW algorithm compression produces binary imagesfailing in this implementation to produce a lossless image. Huffmanand RLE algorithms produce similar results with compression ratiosin the range of 2.5 to 3.7, and the algorithms are based on redundancyreduction. The DCT and DWT algorithms compress every elementin the matrix defined for the images maintaining lossless quality withcompression ratios in the range 2 to 3.5.

Conclusion: The DWT algorithm is best suitable for a more efficientway to compress an image in a lossless technique. As the wavelets areused in this compression, all the elements in the image are compressedwhile retaining the quality. The Huffman and RLE produce losslessimages, but for a large variety of images, some of the images may notbe compressed with complete efficiency.