PROCESSES, APPARATUSES, AND SYSTEMS OF ENCODING AND DECODING SIGNALS USING TRANSFORMS

A signal is encoding, in part, by generating the transform of the signal in a transform domain. The coefficients of the transformed signal are then ordered according to a statistical model of the transform. Decoding of the encoded signal generates progressively accurate approximations of the fully reconstructed signal. If, for some reason, decoding is truncated, a useable partial result will nevertheless be available. In a preferred embodiment, natural image signals are encoded by ordering the coefficients of the transformed signal generated by applying a discrete cosine transform. Decoding of the encoded signals generates progressively accurate approximations of the fully reconstructed image. The invention has particular application to systems with limited and/or variable transmission, storage, and/or decode processing bandwidth.