Direct processing of EZW compressed image data

Abstract

A method is presented for the processing of EZW encoded image data. Operations of the type expected to be performed by a graphics server-pixel-wise arithmetic, offset, scaling and convolution-are considered specifically. We implement the algorithms within the framework of the EZW codec-suggesting that the codec may in fact be used as an image co-processor. The algorithms that result offer similar scalability to the EZW decoder in that processing may be terminated at an arbitrary point to yield an approximation to the full result.