Exploration of tradeoffs in the design of integer cosine transforms for image compression

In image data compression, integer cosine transforms (ICTs) have been preferred to discrete cosine transforms (DCTs) due to their similar transform efficiency and lower implementation cost. However, there exist many alternative ICTs with different performance measures and implementation costs. In this work, we explore all possible ICTs, compute their performance measures, and find their implementation costs in terms of the number of adders/subtractors, where a state-of-art technique is used to realize ICTs under a shift-adds architecture. We also investigate the tradeoff between performance and implementation cost, present the pareto-optimal points of this tradeoff, and introduce promising ICTs that were not considered before.