A wavelet-based two-stage near-lossless coder with L∞-error scalability

We present a wavelet-based near-lossless coder with L-infinity-error scalability. The method presented consists of a wavelet-based lossy layer encoder followed by multiple stages of residual refinements for L-infinity-error scalability. We introduce a successive refinement scheme in L-infinity-error sense for residual layers reminiscent of popular set-partitioning algorithms for embedded coding. The initial near-lossless error bound is attained by our previously proposed two-stage scheme which determines the bit-rate for the lossy layer 'on-the-fly' without any iteration. The resulting residual which is defined by the difference between the original and the initial near-lossless reconstruction is then further refined in L-infinity-error sense up to lossless reconstruction. This scheme provides a combination of L-2-error embedded lossy reconstruction up to an automatically determined high-fidelity plus optional layers of scalable L-2-error. This may turn out to be particularly useful for scalable archival applications where the fidelity of reconstructions on the high-bit end needs to be strictly controlled.