An economical method for obtaining a nearly-optimal threshold for the
block truncation coding (BTC) image compression algorithm is presented
. Simulation results show that the PSNR performance of the proposed ec
onomic BTC (EBTC) method is very close to that of the optimised BTC (O
BTC) algorithm, but EBTC only takes about half the computation time re
quired by the OBTC algorithm.