Design of multiplierless, high-performance, wavelet filter banks with image compression applications

The JPEG2000 image coding standard employs the biorthogonal 9/7 wavelet for lossy compression. The performance of a hardware implementation of the 9/7 filter bank depends on the accuracy and the efficiency with which the quantized filter coefficients are represented. A high-precision representation ensures compression performance close to the unquantized, infinite precision filter bank, but at the cost of increased hardware resources and processing time. If the filter coefficients are quantized such that the filter bank properties are preserved, then, the degradation in compression performance will be minimal. This paper investigates two filter structures and two "compensating" filter coefficient quantization methods for improving the performance of multiplierless, quantized filter banks. Rather than using an optimization technique to guide the design process, the new methods utilizes the perfect reconstruction requirements of the filter bank. The results indicate that the best method (a cascade structure with compensating zeros) realizes image-compression performance very similar to the unquantized filter case while also achieving a fast, efficient hardware implementation.