Image Compression via Joint Statistical Characterization in the Wavelet Domain

We develop a statistical characterization of natural images in the wavelet transform domain. This characterization describes the joint statistics between pairs of subband coefficients at adjacent spatial locations, orientations, and scales. We observe that the raw coefficients are nearly decorrelated, but their magnitudes are highly correlated. A linear magnitude predictor coupled with both multiplicative and additive uncertainties accounts for the joint coefficient statistics of a wide variety of images including photographic images, graphical images, and medical images. In order to directly demonstrate the power of this model, we construct an image coder called EPWIC (Embedded Predictive Wavelet Image Coder), in which subband coefficients are encoded one bitplane at a time using a non-adaptive arithmetic encoder that utilizes probabilities calculated from the model. Bitplanes are ordered using a greedy algorithm that considers the MSE reduction per encoded bit. The decoder uses the s..