CAPTEC, a small company in Dublin, Ireland, has been penetrating the lossless JPEG market since many end-users don't require the full complement of JPEG2000 development tools. There are a few industry and international standard lossless image compression methods available, such as TIFF-LZW, TGA-LZW, PNG, Lossless JPEG and the JPEG-2000 method, but all these methods suffer from either poor compression results or slow operation. The best methods are not well supported by imaging applications. CAPTEC's approach is not to introduce yet another compressed image file format, but rather to compress the image with its original file format, making it easy to use with existing applications.

With a totally lossless image compression and CRC guarantee reversibility (RICAZIP), and compression ratios up to 8:1, it has consistently outperformed all other lossless compression methods including Aware's JPEG2000 implementation. The RICA-F option provides compression at up to 6 MB/s and decompression at up to 12Mb/s. While lossy compression methods are suitable for low end use (e.g., holiday photos, Web pages, non-diagnostic quality), lossless compression methods are required for professional image users (e.g., diagnostic medical imaging, microscopy, professional photography and military applications). Johnson and Johnson in the U.S. and a Telecardiology application in Dublin have been big design wins for CAPTEC.

RICA means Reversible Image Compression Algorithm, and it is designed to work efficiently with the very large format images, typically found in technical and scientific application areas.

Len Yencharis - Advanced Imaging magazine, January 2003.

©2004 CAPTEC
Computer Applied Techniques Ltd.