Parallel pipeline implementation of wavelet transforms

Wavelet transforms have been one of the important signal processing developments in the last decade, especially for applications such as time-frequency analysis, data compression, segmentation and vision. Although several efficient implementations of wavelet transforms have been derived, their computational burden is still considerable. The paper describes two generic parallel implementations of wavelet transforms, based on the pipeline processor farming methodology, which have the potential to achieve real-time performance. Results show that the parallel implementation of the oversampled wavelet transform achieves virtually linear speedup, while the parallel implementation of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) also outperforms the sequential version, provided that the filter order is large. The DWT parallelisation performance improves with increasing data length and filter order, while the frequency-domain implementation performance is independent of wavelet filter order. Parallel pipeline implementations are currently suitable for processing multidimensional images with data length at least 512 pixels