An efficient implementation of hierarchical image coding

An efficient technique for hierarchical image coding is proposed, which divides an image into its multiple resolution versions with minimum hardware cost. Since the proposed technique uses discrete cosine transform (DCT) over each frequency band data, obtained directly from DCT domain by multiplying pre-calculated matrices, compatibility can be preserved easily with DCT-based image/video standards. First, we present the 1-D case, followed by an extension to the 2-D case. The proposed coder is observed to result in significant reduction of memory and computational complexity requirement with higher peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), when compared with traditional hierarchical image coding method.