Coding of still images under MPEG-4 and the recent decision by the JPEG committee to recommend a new standard under JPEG2000 has brought up a new image compression technique. The committee has decided to recommend a new way of coding still images based on the wavelet transform, in sharp contrast to the discrete cosine transform (DCT) used in the other standard codecs, as well as the original JPEG. In this chapter we introduce this wavelet transform and show how it can be used for image compression.

Inspec keywords: image coding; data compression; discrete cosine transforms; wavelet transforms; codecs

Other keywords: wavelet transform; subband coding; JPEG2000; standard codec; MPEG-4; advanced video coding; image compression technique; image coding; discrete cosine transform

Subjects: Image and video coding