Interactive progressive image transmission for realtime applications

This paper presents an interactive progressive image transmission method, which enables a remote user to interactively select and transmit preferred regions from an index image. Our enhanced quadtree decomposition using PSNR-based rules and new implicit quadtree coding provide better rate-distortion performance than previous quadtree coders as well as leading bit plane methods. An adaptive traversal of child nodes is introduced for better visual display of restored images. Depth-first traversal combined with breadth-first traversal of the quadtree to accomplish interactive transmission as presented, results in a method that provides competitive performance at a low level of computational complexity. Moreover, our decoding requires only simple arithmetic which is enabling our method to be used for real-time and mobile applications.