Understanding wavelet image compression
Stéphane Mallat, Frédéric Falzon · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1997
It is shown that the high-resolution transform code framework is not appropriate to evaluate the performance of current image transform codes. The compression performance depends essentially on the precision of non-linear image approximations in the chosen orthogonal basis. At low bit rates, for a number of bit per pixel R that is below 1, the distortion is D(R) approximately R1-2(gamma ). The constant (gamma) is typically of the order of 1 for natural images decomposed in a wavelet basis.