Compressing images using edges and textures separately

This paper presents an image compression technique that codifies edges and textures of a given image separately using the wavelet transform. The proposed method has been developed in order to improve a low bit-rate scheme for still images. This kind of approach produces image contours that are well-defined and are not destroyed by the compression process, which is what usually happens on most coding methods. Several test images have been coded with the proposed method and the results show that the reconstructed images have good performance in relation to their PSNR and, especially, in terms of visual perception.