A Progressive Image Transmission Scheme Based on Block Truncation Coding

Abstract

In this paper, a new progressive image transmission (PIT) method is presented. The proposed method is derived from block truncation coding (BTC), which is a simple and fast image compression method in the spatial domain. We add the progressive ability to the traditional BTC method so that it can transmit an image progressively. In this method, we firstly encode an image into a binary tree. The nodes of the binary tree is constructed by BTC and, moreover, in each phase of PIT, we transmit all nodes of the corresponding level of the binary tree to the receiver. The receiver can reconstruct a rough image according to the received messages. This rough image is similar to the original. Moreover, the similarity will be improved phase by phase. In the experiments, we compare the proposed method with the bit plane method (BPM) since both BPM and the proposed method belong to the same category of bipartite approach. The results show that the proposed method has the lower bit rate and the higher reconstructed image quality than those of BPM in each phase.KeywordsBlock truncation codingprogressive image transmissionbit plane method