Efficient, highly scalable wavelet image coding for network applications

A new efficient, highly scalable wavelet image coding algorithm is proposed in this paper. Two techniques-morphological representation and quadtree partitioning - are efficiently combined to exploit the nature of wavelet coefficients. Thanks to the list structure, the new coding algorithm achieves fine fractional bit-plane coding with negligible additional complexity. Experiments show that it performs comparable or better than the state-of-the-art codecs. Furthermore, the flexible codec supports both quality and resolution scalability, which is very attractive in many network applications.