EBWIC: a low complexity and efficient rate constrained wavelet image coder

Efficient compression algorithms generally use wavelet transforms. They try to exploit all the signal dependencies that can appear inside and across the different sub-bands of the decomposition. This provides highly complex algorithms that can´t generally he implemented for real-time purposes. However, efficiency of a coding scheme highly depends on bit allocation. In this paper, we present a new wavelet based image coder EBWIC (efficient bit allocation wavelet image coder). This algorithm is based on an accurate modelisation of the distortion-rate curve even at low bit rate. It results that the efficiency of our method is very close to JPEG 2000 with a very low complexity and possible parallelization of the encoding process. The method proposed below has a complexity less than 60 arithmetic operations per pixel (against about 300 for JPEG 2000). Our method can be applied whatever the wavelet transform (quincunx, dyadic...) and the entropy coder are. It can be used for strip-based processing