Application of the embedded wavelet hierarchical image coder to very low bit rate image coding

• Authors: Jerome M. Shapiro
• Venue: ICASSP'93 Proceedings of the 1993 IEEE international conference on Acoustics, speech, and signal processing: image and multidimensional signal processing - Volume V
• Year: 1993

The embedded wavelet hierarchical image coder, is a simple and effective, image compression algorithm, having the property that the bits in the bit stream are generated in order of importance yielding a fully embedded code. Additionally, the algorithm has consistently produced compression results that are competitive with virtually all known compression algorithms on standard test images. Yet this performance is achieved with a technique that requires absolutely no training, no pre-stored tables or codebooks, and requires no prior knowledge of the image source. An analysis of the algorithm is presented in which the embedded code is viewed as a sequence of binary decisions that distinguish an image from the "null" image, i.e. the all-gray image. Thus, the technique is similar in spirit to binary finite-precision representations of real numbers. Finally, the paper discusses an interesting application of very low-bit rate image coding: image database browsing.