Best wavelet packet bases using rate-distortion criteria

For a given hierarchy of admissible quantizers, the authors show an efficient scheme for coding adaptive trees whose individual nodes spawn off descendants forming a disjoint and complete basis cover for the space spanned by their parent nodes. The scheme presented guarantees operation on the convex hull of the operational R-D curve for the admissible hierarchy of quantizers. Applications for this coding technique include the CMQW (Coifman, Meyer, Quake, and Wickerhauser, 1990) generalized multiresolution wavelet packet decomposition, iterative subband coders, and quadtree structures. An application to image processing involving quadtrees with a family of DCT (discrete cosine transform) bases has been demonstrated in a JPEG-like coding environment with good improvement shown over the static JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) coding scheme