Adaptive EZW coding using a rate-distortion criterion
Che-Yi Yin · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2001
This work presents a new method that improves on the EZW image coding algorithm. The standard EZW image coder uses a uniform quantizer with a threshold (deadzone) that is identical in all subbands. The quantization step sizes are not optimized under the rate-distortion sense. We modify the EZW by applying the Lagrange multiplier to search for the best step size for each subband and allocate the bit rate for each subband accordingly. Then we implement the adaptive EZW codec to code the wavelet coefficients. Two coding environments, independent and dependent, are considered for the optimization process. The proposed image coder retains all the good features of the EZW, namely, embedded coding, progressive transmission, order of the important bits, and enhances it through the rate-distortion optimization with respect to the step sizes.