Effect of Lossy JPEG Compression of an Image with Chromatic Aberrations on Target Measurement Accuracy

Abstract. This paper reports an experiment conducted to investigate the effect of lossy JPEG compression of an image with chromatic aberrations on the measurement accuracy of target center by the intensity-weighted centroid method. I utilized six images shooting a white sheet with 30 by 20 black filled circles in the experiment. The images were acquired by a digital camera Canon EOS 20D. The image data were compressed by using two compression parameter sets of a downsampling ratio, a quantization table and a Huffman code table utilized in EOS 20D. The experiment results clearly indicate that lossy JPEG compression of an image with chromatic aberrations would produce a significant effect on measurement accuracy of target center by the intensity-weighted centroid method. The maximum displacements of red, green and blue components caused by lossy JPEG compression were 0.20, 0.09, and 0.20 pixels respectively. The results also suggest that the downsampling of the chrominance components Cb and Cr in lossy JPEG compression would produce displacements between uncompressed image data and compressed image data. In conclusion, since the author consider that it would be unable to correct displacements caused by lossy JPEG compression, the author would recommend that lossy JPEG compression before recording an image in a digital camera should not be executed in case of highly precise image measurement by using color images acquired by a non-metric digital camera.