<title>Hierarchical weighted vector quantization (HWVQ) for embedded wavelet coding</title>

Abstract

We propose a coding scheme that performs vector quantization (VQ) of the wavelet transform coefficients of an image. The proposed scheme uses different vector dimensions for different wavelet subbands and also different codebook sizes so that more bits are assigned to those subbands that have more energy. Another element of the proposed method is that the vector codebooks used are obtained recursively from the image that is to be compressed. By ordering the bit-stream properly, we can maintain the embedding property, since the wavelet coefficients are ordered according to their energy. Preliminary numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.