Simple but efficient way to store a series of small changes to an image?

Posted by finnw on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by finnw
Published on 2010-03-31T02:55:49Z Indexed on 2010/03/31 3:03 UTC
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I have a series of images. Each one is typically (but not always) similar to the previous one, with 3 or 4 small rectangular regions updated. I need to record these changes using a minimum of disk space.

The source images are not compressed, but I would like the deltas to be compressed.

I need to be able to recreate the images exactly as input (so a lossy video codec is not appropriate.)

I am thinking of something along the lines of:

  • Composite the new image with a negative of the old image
  • Save the composited image in any common format that can compress using RLE (probably PNG.)
  • Recreate the second image by compositing the previous image with the delta.

Although the images have an alpha channel, I can ignore it for the purposes of this function.

Is there an easy-to-implement algorithm or free Java library with this capability?

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