In this paper, an experimental study of the statistical properties of wavel
et coefficients of image data is presented, as well as the design of two di
fferent morphology-based image coding algorithms that make use of these sta
tistics. A salient feature of the proposed methods is that, by a simple cha
nge of quantizers, the same basic algorithm yields high performance embedde
d or fixed rate coders. Another important feature is that the shape informa
tion of morphological sets used in this coder is encoded implicitly by the
values of wavelet coefficients, thus avoiding the use of explicit and rate
expensive shape descriptors. These proposed algorithms, while achieving nea
rly the same objective performance of state-of-the-art zerotree based metho
ds, are able to produce reconstructions of a somewhat superior perceptual q
uality, due to a property of joint compression and noise reduction they exh
ibit.