TWO-STEP PROVIDING OF DESIRED QUALITY IN LOSSY IMAGE COMPRESSION BY SPIHT

Abstract

Image information technology has become an important perception technology considering the task of providing lossy image compression with the desired quality using certain encoders Recent researches have shown that the use of a two-step method can perform the compression in a very simple manner and with reduced compression time under the premise of providing a desired visual quality accuracy. However, different encoders have different compression algorithms. These issues involve providing the accuracy of the desired quality. This paper considers the application of the two-step method in an encoder based on a discrete wavelet transform (DWT). In the experiment, bits per pixel (BPP) is used as the control parameter to vary and predict the compressed image quality, and three visual quality evaluation metrics (PSNR, PSNR-HVS, PSNR-HVS-M) are analyzed. In special cases, the two-step method is allowed to be modified. This modification relates to the cases when images subject to lossy compression are either too simple or too complex and linear approximation of dependences is no more valid. Experimental data prove that, compared with the single-step method, after performing the two-step compression method, the mean square error of differences between desired and provided values drops by an order of magnitude. For PSNR-HVS-M, the error of the two-step method does not exceed 3.6 dB. The experiment has been conducted for Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT), a typical image encoder based on DWT, but it can be expected that the proposed method applies to other DWT-based image compression techniques. The results show that the application range of the two-step lossy compression method has been expanded. It is not only suitable for encoders based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) but also works well for DWT-based encoders.