SAR image compression with vector quantization of wavelet trees at low bit rates
WiCOM'09 Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Wireless communications, networking and mobile computing
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We present a novel vector quantizer (VQ) image coding algorithm, called synthetic texture VQ (STVQ), that employs shape-gain techniques to adaptively modify a synthetically-generated codebook to changing image statistics. We recursively apply STVQ to encode high-pass bands of a wavelet transform using the low-pass band as side information. An advantage of our approach is that no training is required to construct codebooks. We demonstrate STVQ on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery and show that it provides efficient coding of the characteristic SAR image texture while preserving perceptual quality. Preliminary comparisons indicate that STVQ's perceptual performance exceeds JPEG at comparable rates, even though the mean-squared error performance of JPEG is better than STVQ.