Multi-Layered image compression using structure tensor for texture identification

Compression of images using transform methods has been of interest for many years. In this paper we propose a new multilayer image compression method which uses wavelet and contourlet transforms. We used structure tensor for identifying texture regions of the image by producing a binary mask. Then we apply wavelet to smooth regions and use contourlet transform for texture area. The proposed method avoids the redundancy of contourlet which has been a bottleneck for low bit rate compression purposes. We showed that images that are compressed and reconstructed by our method at low bit rates have good qualities both visually and in terms of the produced PSNRs.