Human visual system based wavelet decomposition for image compression

Abstract

Due to limitations in bandwidth or storage space, many applications require compression of digital images. One of the main hindrances to progress in the area of image communications is the large amount of information contained in an image. In this paper, we propose a wavelet-based image compression technique which incorporates some of the properties of the human visual system (HVS). A new wavelet decomposition based on the HVS will be introduced. The wavelet coefficients will be quantized with a vector quantization technique which uses HVS properties to allocate bits to the various subbands. The new HVS-based wavelet decomposition will be compared with the existing separable and nonseparable wavelet decompositions. Compression techniques based on such considerations yield higher quality results compared to standard techniques. Several experimental results will be shown. © 1995 Academic Press. All rights reserved.