Progressive display of very high resolution images using wavelets

dDigital or digitized biomedical images often have very high resolutions(1), which make them difficult or impossible to display on computer screens. Therefore, it is desirable to develop a multiresolution display method with which users can freely browse the contents of those high resolution images. In this paper, we present an improved wavelet-based progressive image display algorithm by stressing on the encoding and decoding process. The encoder, which dynamically determines levels of transform and partition of coefficients, is based on a modified Haar wavelet transform. The decoder retrieves the necessary data and reconstructs the requested region at a scale specified by the user. A prototype system, which enables virtually any size of images to be displayed progressively, has been implemented based on this algorithm. The system has low computational complexity for both encoding and decoding process.