IMAGE COMPRESSION USING WEIGHTED FINITE AUTOMATA

We introduce Weighted Finite Automata (WFA) as a tool to define real f unctions, in particular, greyness functions of grey-tone images. Mathe matical properties and the definition power of WFA have been studied b y Culik and Karhumaki. Their generative power is incomparable with Bar nsley's iterative Function Systems. Here, we give an automatic encodin g algorithm that converts an arbitrary grey-tone-image (a digitized ph otograph) into a WFA that can regenerate it (with or without informati on loss). The WFA seems to be the first image definition tool with suc h a relatively simple encoding algorithm.