Robust wavelet zerotree image compression with fixed-length packetization

We present a novel robust image compression algorithm in which the output of a wavelet zerotree-style coder is manipulated into fixed-length segments. The segments are independently decodable, and errors occurring in one segment do not propagate into any other. The method provides both excellent compression performance and graceful degradation under increasing packet losses. We extend the basic scheme to perform region-based compression, in which specified portions of the image are coded to higher quality with little or no side information required by the decoder.