image compression

[Dario Ringach]

I wouldn't expect NNs to perform better on error-free encoding
than any of the standard algorithms (Lempel-Ziv for instance)...

As far as the testing picture you are after, I think most of
the vision community will agree that the famous "Lena" is the usual
picture used for comparison...

If you can tolerate errors in the reconstruction, then there are
a couple of nice works I'm aware of:  Daugman used a net to find
the Gabor expansion of a picture and then compress it, and Sanger
used Oja/Kohonen units + an orthogonalization procedure to obtain
convergence to the first eigenfunction/eigenvalues of the Karhunen-
Loeve expansion, and of course used it to compress the picture.
If anyone is interested I can look for the exact references.
--
Dario.