Performance comparison of SIMD implementations of the discrete wavelet transform

This paper focuses on SIMD implementations of the 2D discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The transforms considered are Daubechies´ real-to-real method of four coefficients (Daub-4) and the integer-to-integer (5, 3) lifting scheme. Daub-4 is implemented using SSE and the lifting scheme using MMX, and their performance is compared to C implementations on a Pentium 4 processor. The MMX implementation of the lifting scheme is up to 4.0× faster than the corresponding C program for a 1-level 2D DWT, while the SSE implementation of Daub-4 is up to 2.6× faster than the C version. It is shown that for some image sizes, the performance is significantly hampered by the so called 64K aliasing problem, which occurs in the Pentium 4 when two data blocks are accessed that are a multiple of 64K apart. It is also shown that for the (5, 3) lifting scheme, a 12-bit word size is sufficient for a 5-level decomposition of the 2D DWT for images of up to 10 bits per pixel.