A CMOS image sensor with focal plane SPIHT image compression

In this paper, a focal plane SPIHT image compression scheme has been integrated on the focal plane of CMOS image sensor. A test chip is prototyped in 0.35 mum technology to verify the design. In our image compression scheme, focal plane prediction replaces the traditional wavelet transform for image decomposition, and the traditional SPIHT coding is modified to reduce computational complexity and to suit the parallel implementation on the sensor focal plane. Simulated compression performance is still good, especially at low bit rates, compared to traditional SPIHT and other compression schemes. Integrating SPIHT compression on the focal plane not only reduces the sensor readout volume, but also provides all the advantages of SPIHT compression including both high image quality and optimized data ordering for progressive image transmission.