HVS-based image compression using the wavelet transform

A simple image-compression scheme based on the wavelet transform and properties of the human visual system (HVS) is proposed. The scheme attempts to achieve better performance results than those achieved with the well-established JPEG compression technique for very high image-quality levels. To achieve this, the wavelet scheme tries to identify the wavelet filter that will result in the smallest number of non-zero coefficients (thus giving a high compression ratio), uses an HVS-based processing module to adaptively quantize wavelet coefficients, and efficiently codes the processed wavelet transform. The results show that the scheme does outperform JPEG in terms of the achievable compression ratios and image quality. Also, the scheme produces very high-quality reconstructed images, which can in fact be considered to be perceptually lossless.