Efficient scalable compression of sparsely sampled images

Advanced sparse sampling acquisition systems capture only scattered information from the continuous image domain. Unfortunately, conventional image encoders are not yet able to properly compress arbitrarily subsampled image data. This work introduces a system leveraging the JPEG 2000 image compression framework by enabling scalable compression of the selected image samples. Using a complete dictionary of CDF 9/7 wavelets, a minimum l₁-norm compressed sensing solution is recovered which can be fed directly into the encoder, producing a bitstream that can be decoded with existing JPEG 2000-compliant implementations. Experiments on standard images with quasi-random subsampling demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms regular JPEG 2000 compression of stacked sample images and quad-tree based compression for point-clouds. We also demonstrate the robustness of the technique for images that infringe the sparsity prior of compressed sensing.