Performance analysis of integer wavelet transform for image compression

Abstract

For image compression, it is very necessary that the selection of transform should reduce the size of the resultant data as compared to the original data set. In this paper, a new lossless image compression method is proposed. For continuous and discrete time cases, wavelet transform and wavelet packet transform has emerged as popular techniques. While integer wavelet using the lifting scheme significantly reduces the computation time, we propose a completely new approach for further speeding up the computation. First, wavelet packet transform (WPT) and lifting scheme (LS) are described. Then an application of the LS to WPT is presented which leads to the generation of integer wavelet packet transform (IWPT). The proposed method, Integer Wavelet Packet Transform (IWPT) yields a representation which can be lossless, as it maps an integer valued sequence onto the integer valued coefficients. The idea of Wavelet Packet Tree is used to transform the still and color images. IWPT tree can be built by iterating the single wavelet decomposition step on both the low-pass and high-pass branches, with rounding off in order to achieve the integer transforms. Thus, the proposed method provides good compression ratio.