Progressive image transmission using symmetric residue pyramids

Progressive image transmission (PIT) using Burt-Laplacian pyramids is an efficient way to transmit images on unreliable communication networks. Advantage of using pyramids is that this method is able to display a coarser view of the entire image without aliasing artifacts, even when transmission is unexpectedly truncated. Burt-Laplacian pyramid encoding gives acceptable results so long as the rate is above 1 bpp. The performance, however, deteriorates for very low rates where it ends up giving high distortion. We present the usage of pyramids for progressive transmission of images that gives significant improvement in the perceptual quality of the progressively transmitted images when the rate is well below 1 bpp.