Non-embedded wavelet image coding scheme

A novel wavelet image coding scheme is presented. Significant discrete wavelet transformed coefficients are first selected with a threshold. Then, these significant coefficients are quantized with a uniform quantizer and decomposed into two parts: the most significant bit and the residual bits for entropy encoding. Simple but effective context modeling schemes are proposed for better squeezing of the redundancy lying in the significant map symbol stream determined by the threshold operation and the MSB symbol stream decomposed from the quantized significant coefficients. With these innovations, the proposed coding scheme outperforms all zerotree-structured embedded wavelet coding schemes and is competitive with other advanced coding algorithms reported in the literature.