EFFICIENT LOSSY IMAGE COMPRESSION TECHNIQUE BASED ON SEAM IDENTIFICATION AND SPIHT CODING

ABSTRACT The project proposes the seam based efficient image compression using integer wavelet transform and Lossy encoding techniques. In mobile multimedia communications, image retargeting is generally required at the user end. However, content-based image retargeting is with high computational complexity and is not suitable for mobile devices with limited computing power. The work presented in this paper addresses the increasing demand of visual signal delivery to terminals with arbitrary resolutions, without heavy computational burden to the receiving end. In this paper, the principle of seam carving is incorporated into a wavelet codec (i.e., SPIHT). For each input image, block-based seam energy map is generated in the pixel domain and the integer wavelet transform (IWT) is performed for the retargeted image. Different from the conventional wavelet-based coding schemes, IWT coefficients here are grouped and encoded according to the resultant seam energy map. The bit stream is then transmitted in energy descending order. At the decoder side, the end user has the ultimate choice for the spatial scalability without the need to examine the visual content; an image with arbitrary aspect ratio can be reconstructed. Experimental results show that, for the end users, the received images with an arbitrary resolution preserve important content while achieving high coding efficiency for transmission