Enhanced SPIHT Algorithm with Pipelined Datapath Architecture Design

Set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) is an efficient algorithm which is used for the image compression widely. SPIHT operates sequentially so, its parallel implementation is difficult. In this study, the SPIHT algorithm is improved for providing that it is suitable for the parallel processing applications, and the corresponding pipelined datapath is designed for the proposed enhanced SPIHT algorithm. The datapath is designed to have three stages as preprocessing, list generation and output stream. In the preprocessing stage, the flags which are supports the list generation stage are constituted. List of insignificant sets (LIS), list of insignificant pixels (LIP) and list of significant pixels (LSP) are formed in list generation stage. These lists contain the bit values which generate the output bit stream. The performance of the improved datapath design has been tested by compressing different images, and the obtained results are given.