HUMAN VISUAL-SYSTEM BASED WAVELET DECOMPOSITION FOR IMAGE COMPRESSION

Due to limitations in bandwidth or storage space, many applications re quire compression of digital images. One of the main hindrances to pro gress in the area of image communications is the large amount of infor mation contained in an image. In this paper, we propose a wavelet-base d image compression technique which incorporates some of the propertie s of the human visual system (HVS). A new wavelet decomposition based on the HVS will be introduced. The wavelet coefficients will be quanti zed with a vector quantization technique which uses HVS properties to allocate bits to the various subbands. The new HVS-based wavelet decom position will be compared with the existing separable and nonseparable wavelet decompositions. Compression techniques based on such consider ations yield higher quality results compared to standard techniques. S everal experimental results will be shown. (C) 1995 Academic Press, In c.