A critique of SVD-based image coding systems

During the past couple of decades several proposals for image coders using the singular value decomposition (SVD) have been put forward. The results using the SVD in this context have never been spectacular. The main problem with the SVD is that the transform itself must be transmitted as side information. We demonstrate through some simple experiments that for a given image reconstruction quality, more scalar parameters must be transmitted using the SVD, than when using the discrete cosine transform (DCT). Also, using an alternative interpretation of the SVD we show that the SVD representation necessitates quantization of individual factors as compared to quantization of the associated product. This is clearly suboptimal.