WAVELET-BASED COMPRESSION OF IMAGES FOR STORAGE, TRANSMISSION AND RECONSTRUCTION USING HIERARCHICAL SUBBAND DECOMPOSITION

Data compression achieved by set partitioning of hierarchical trees is made more efficient by a family of related traversal schemes which act upon the tree structure and the significance values derived from the tree structure. The tree structure may be traversed in any of a number of sequences. In accordance with significance tests applied to the node data, bits are produced or not. The order in which the bits are produced may be freely chosen. Trees are traversed and bits are emitted which describe the relative magnitude of coefficients in the sub-trees of the current tree-node. The manner of traversal can either be known to the remote decoder or can be derived from the incoming data stream. The encoding scheme typically specifies all bits emitted by a given node v as a function of the traversal of its parents, the bit-plane b, the coefficient value c of v, the significances B1(v) and B2(v), and whether the parent node p still emits B2(p).