A New Transformation Technique for Reducing Information Entropy: A Case Study on Greyscale Raster Images

Entropy (Basel). 2023 Nov 27;25(12):1591. doi: 10.3390/e25121591.

Abstract

This paper proposes a new string transformation technique called Move with Interleaving (MwI). Four possible ways of rearranging 2D raster images into 1D sequences of values are applied, including scan-line, left-right, strip-based, and Hilbert arrangements. Experiments on 32 benchmark greyscale raster images of various resolutions demonstrated that the proposed transformation reduces information entropy to a similar extent as the combination of the Burrows-Wheeler transform followed by the Move-To-Front or the Inversion Frequencies. The proposed transformation MwI yields the best result among all the considered transformations when the Hilbert arrangement is applied.

Keywords: Hilbert space filling curve; algorithm; computer science; information entropy; string transformation.