An Efficient Rearrangement of Wavelet Packet Coefficients for Embedded Image Coding Based on SPIHT Algorithm

In this paper, we propose an efficient method for rearranging the wavelet packet coefficients of an image to form hierarchical trees, by which the well known SPIHT algorithm can be applied. For images with textures, the high frequency wavelet coefficients are likely to become significant after several code passes of SPIHT, which degrades substantially the coding performance. As a result, the high frequency wavelet coefficients representing most of the high detail content of images need to be decomposed into wavelet packet coefficients for a further exploitation. The proposed rearrangement scheme has been applied to the highest frequency wavelet packet coefficients of images. Experimental results show that the performance of SPIHT can be improved, especially for fingerprint images. key words: wavelet, wavelet packet, embedded coding, SPIHT, fingerprint