A rate-constrained adaptive quantization scheme for wavelet pyramid image coding

Conference theme: Connecting the WorldIt is well known that orthogonal wavelet transform with filters of nonlinear phase gives poor visual results in low bit rate image coding. Biorthogonal wavelet is a good substitute, which is, however essentially nonorthogonal. A greedy steepest descend algorithm is proposed to design an adaptive quantization scheme based on the actual statistics of the input image. Since the L2 norm of the quantization error is not preserved through the nonorthogonal transform, a quantization error estimation formula considering the characteristic value of the reconstruction filters is derived to incorporate the adaptive quantization scheme. Computer simulation results demonstrate significant SNR gains over standard coding technique, and comparable visual improvements.published_or_final_versio

Survey of Hybrid Image Compression Techniques

A compression process is to reduce or compress the size of data while maintaining the quality of information contained therein. This paper presents a survey of research papers discussing improvement of various hybrid compression techniques during the last decade. A hybrid compression technique is a technique combining excellent properties of each group of methods as is performed in JPEG compression method. This technique combines lossy and lossless compression method to obtain a high-quality compression ratio while maintaining the quality of the reconstructed image. Lossy compression technique produces a relatively high compression ratio, whereas lossless compression brings about high-quality data reconstruction as the data can later be decompressed with the same results as before the compression. Discussions of the knowledge of and issues about the ongoing hybrid compression technique development indicate the possibility of conducting further researches to improve the performance of image compression method

A Panorama on Multiscale Geometric Representations, Intertwining Spatial, Directional and Frequency Selectivity

The richness of natural images makes the quest for optimal representations in image processing and computer vision challenging. The latter observation has not prevented the design of image representations, which trade off between efficiency and complexity, while achieving accurate rendering of smooth regions as well as reproducing faithful contours and textures. The most recent ones, proposed in the past decade, share an hybrid heritage highlighting the multiscale and oriented nature of edges and patterns in images. This paper presents a panorama of the aforementioned literature on decompositions in multiscale, multi-orientation bases or dictionaries. They typically exhibit redundancy to improve sparsity in the transformed domain and sometimes its invariance with respect to simple geometric deformations (translation, rotation). Oriented multiscale dictionaries extend traditional wavelet processing and may offer rotation invariance. Highly redundant dictionaries require specific algorithms to simplify the search for an efficient (sparse) representation. We also discuss the extension of multiscale geometric decompositions to non-Euclidean domains such as the sphere or arbitrary meshed surfaces. The etymology of panorama suggests an overview, based on a choice of partially overlapping "pictures". We hope that this paper will contribute to the appreciation and apprehension of a stream of current research directions in image understanding.Comment: 65 pages, 33 figures, 303 reference

Stack-run adaptive wavelet image compression

We report on the development of an adaptive wavelet image coder based on stack-run representation of the quantized coefficients. The coder works by selecting an optimal wavelet packet basis for the given image and encoding the quantization indices for significant coefficients and zero runs between coefficients using a 4-ary arithmetic coder. Due to the fact that our coder exploits the redundancies present within individual subbands, its addressing complexity is much lower than that of the wavelet zerotree coding algorithms. Experimental results show coding gains of up to 1:4dB over the benchmark wavelet coding algorithm