Waveform and image compression using the Burrows Wheeler transform and the wavelet transform

Recently, the Burrows Wheeler transform (BWT) has been proposed for text compression. The BWT based compression algorithm performs close to the best algorithm known today on a set of standard text files, and it has less complexity. In this paper we propose a novel waveform and image compression scheme using the Burrows Wheeler transform. We show that the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) could be used before the Burrows Wheeler transform to improve the compression performance for many natural signals and images. We demonstrate that the simple concatenation of the DWT and BWT coding performs comparably as the embedded zerotree wavelet (EZW) compression for images. Various techniques that significantly improve the performance of our compression scheme are also discussed.