A very low bit-rate embedded color image coding with SPIHT

We propose an efficient extension of set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) for very low bit-rate wavelet based color image coding. Since the chrominance components I and Q in the YIQ format are sufficiently less significant in terms of energy compared to the luminance component, the trees within each chrominance plane are joined together in the list of insignificant sets (LIS) according to a virtual relationship parent-descendants specific to the chrominance components. For generating a fully embedded bit stream similar to SPIHT, the proposed method improves the performance of the color SPIHT based scheme, especially for very low bit rate.