Highly efficient codec based on significance-linked connected-component analysis of wavelet coefficients
Bing-Bing Chai, J. Vass, Xinhua Zhuang · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1997
Recent success in wavelet coding is mainly attributed to the recognition of importance of data organization. There has been several very competitive wavelet codecs developed, namely, Shapiro's Embedded Zerotree Wavelets (EZW), Servetto et. al.'s Morphological Representation of Wavelet Data (MRWD), and Said and Pearlman's Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT). In this paper, we propose a new image compression algorithm called Significant-Linked Connected Component Analysis (SLCCA) of wavelet coefficients. SLCCA exploits both within-subband clustering of significant coefficients and cross-subband dependency in significant fields. A so-called significant link between connected components is designed to reduce the positional overhead of MRWD. In addition, the significant coefficients' magnitude are encoded in bit plane order to match the probability model of the adaptive arithmetic coder. Experiments show that SLCCA outperforms both EZW and MRWD, and is tied with SPIHT. Furthermore, it is observed that SLCCA generally has the best performance on images with large portion of texture. When applied to fingerprint image compression, it outperforms FBI's wavelet scalar quantization by about 1 dB.