Novel embedded image coding algorithms based on wavelet difference reduction

Wavelet difference reduction (WDR) has recently been proposed as a method for efficient embedded image coding. In this paper, the WDR algorithm is analysed and four new techniques are proposed to either reduce its complexity or improve its rate distortion (RD) performance. The first technique, dubbed modified WDR-A (MWDR-A), focuses on improving the efficiency of the arithmetic coding (AC) stage of the WDR. Based on experiments with the statistics of the output symbol sequence, it is shown that the symbols can either be arithmetic coded under different contexts or output without AC. In the second technique, MWDR-B, the AC stage is dropped from the coder. By employing MWDR-B, up to 20% of coding time can be saved without sacrificing the RD performance, when compared to WDR. The third technique focuses on the improvement of RD performance using context modelling. A low-complexity context model is proposed to exploit the statistical dependency among the wavelet coefficients. This technique is termed context-modelled WDR (CM-WDR), and acts without the AC stage to improve the RD performance by up to 1.5 dB over WDR on a set of test images, at various bit rates. The fourth technique combines CM-WDR with AC and achieves a 0.2 dB improvement over CM-WDR in terms of PSNR. The proposed techniques retain all the features of WDR, including low complexity, region-of-interest capability, and embeddedness.