Signal-adapted directional lifting scheme for image compression

In this paper, we propose a new adaptive lifting scheme that not only locally adapts the filtering directions to the orientations of image features, but also adapts the lifting filters to the statistic properties of image signal. The proposed approach refines previous adaptive directional lifting-based wavelet transform (ADL) by combining directional lifting and adaptive lifting filters to form a unified framework. The image signal is first segmented into regions of textures and edges with close directional features. The lifting filters are then effectively designed. The prediction step is designed to minimize the prediction error of the image signal, and the update step is designed to minimize the reconstruction error. Significant improvements on objective and subjective quality over conventional 2-D wavelet transform and previous ADL transform are achieved.