Shape-Direction-Adaptive Lifting-Based Discrete Wavelet Transform for Arbitrarily Shaped Segments in Image Compression

In this paper, a new lifting-based shape-direction-adapti discrete wavelet transform (SDA-DWT) which can be used for arbitraril shaped segments is proposed. The SDA-DWT contains three major techniques: the lifting-based DWT, the adaptive directional technique, and the concept of object-based compression in MPEG-4. With SDA-DWT, the number of transformed coefficients is equal to the number of pixels in the arbitrarily shaped segment image, and the spatial correlation across subbands is well preserved. SDA-DWT also can locally adapt its filtering directions according to the texture orientations to improve energy compaction for images containing non-horizontal or non-vertical edge textures. SDA-DWT can be applied to any application that is wavelet based and the lifting technique provides much flexibility for hardware implementation Experimental results show that, for still object images with rich orientation textures, SDA-DWT outperforms SA-DWT up to 5.88dB in PSNR under 2.15-bpp (bit/object pixel) condition, and reduces the bit-budget up to 28.5% for lossless compression. SDA-DWT also outperforms DADWT up to 5.44dB in PSNR under 3.28-bpp condition, and reduces the bit-budget up to 14.0%. key words: compression, textures, set-partitioning embedded block codex (SPECK), object-based video coding, shape-direction-adaptive DWT (SDA-DWT)