The visual efficiency of an image compression technique depends directly on the amount of visually significant information it retains. By "visually significant" we mean information to which a human observer is most sensitive. The overall sensitivity depends on aspects such as contrast, color, spatial frequency, and so forth. One important aspect is the inverse relationship between contrast sensitivity and spatial frequency. This is described by the contrast sensitivity function (CSF). In compression algorithms the CSF can be exploited to regulate the quantization step-size to minimize the visibility of compression artifacts. Existing CSF implementations for wavelet-based image compression use the same quantization step-size for a large range of spatial frequencies. This is a coarse approximation of the CSF. This paper presents two new techniques that implement the CSF at significantly higher precision, adapting even to local variations of the spatial frequencies within a decomposition subband. The approaches can be used for luminance as well as color images. For color perception three different CSFs describe the sensitivity. The implementation technique is the same for each color band. Implemented into the JPEG2000 compression standard, the new techniques are compared to conventional CSF-schemes. The proposed techniques turn out to be visually more efficient than previously published methods. However, the emphasis of this paper is on how the CSF can be implemented in a precise and locally adaptive way, and not on the superior performance of these techniques.
The use of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for embedded lossy image compression is now well established. One of the possible implementations of the DWT is the lifting scheme (LS). Because perfect reconstruction is granted by the structure of the LS, nonlinear transforms can be used, allowing efficient lossless compression as well. The integer wavelet transform (IWT) is one of them. This is an interesting alternative to the DWT because its rate-distortion performance is similar and the differences can be predicted. This topic is investigated in a theoretical framework. A model of the degradations caused by the use of the IWT instead of the DWT for lossy compression is presented. The rounding operations are modeled as additive noise. The noise are then propagated through the LS structure to measure their impact on the reconstructed pixels. This methodology is verified using simulations with random noise as input. It predicts accurately the results obtained using images compressed by the well-known EZW algorithm. Experiment are also performed to measure the difference in terms of bit rate and visual quality. This allows to a better understanding of the impact of the IWT when applied to lossy image compression.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.