Wavelet-based Contourlet Packet Image Coding

The contourlet transform is a new directional transform, which is capable of capturing contours and fine details in images. We recently introduced the wavelet-based contourlet transform (WBCT) that is a non-redundant version of the contourlet transform, and appropriately used this transform for image coding. In this paper, we introduce the concept of wavelet-based contourlet packets (WBCP), which is similar to the notion of wavelet packets (WP). Using WBCP, we have the flexibility of choosing the most proper basis based on a criterion. In this work, we utilize WBCP for image coding to extend our previous work that was based on WBCT for image coding. Our simulation results show that the proposed WBCT packets provide both visual and PSNR improvements over WBCT. Moreover, for texture images the results outperform those of WP, visually, while achieve comparable PSNR values.