K K Shukla - Böcker

Image compression is concerned with minimization of the number of information carrying units used to represent an image. Lossy compression techniques incur some loss of information which is usually imperceptible. In return for accepting this distortion, we obtain much higher compression ratios than is possible with lossless compression. Salient features of this book include: four new image compression algorithms and implementation of these algorithms; detailed discussion of fuzzy geometry measures and their application in image compression algorithms; new domain decomposition based algorithms using image quality measures and study of various quality measures for gray scale image compression; compression algorithms for different parallel architectures and evaluation of time complexity for encoding on all architectures; parallel implementation of image compression algorithms on a cluster in Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) environment.

Due to its inherent time-scale locality characteristics, the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) has received considerable attention in signal/image processing. Wavelet transforms have excellent energy compaction characteristics and can provide perfect reconstruction. The shifting (translation) and scaling (dilation) are unique to wavelets. Orthogonality of wavelets with respect to dilations leads to multigrid representation. As the computation of DWT involves filtering, an efficient filtering process is essential in DWT hardware implementation. In the multistage DWT, coefficients are calculated recursively, and in addition to the wavelet decomposition stage, extra space is required to store the intermediate coefficients. Hence, the overall performance depends significantly on the precision of the intermediate DWT coefficients. This work presents new implementation techniques of DWT, that are efficient in terms of computation, storage, and with better signal-to-noise ratio in the reconstructed signal.