An overview of the visual optimization tools in JPEG 2000

The human visual system plays a key role in the final perceived quality of the compressed images. It is therefore desirable to allow system designers and users to take advantage of the current knowledge of visual perception and models in a compression system. In this paper, we review the various tools in JPEG-2000 that allow its users to exploit many properties of the human visual system such as spatial frequency sensitivity, color sensitivity, and the visual masking effects. We show that the visual tool sets in JPEG-2000 are much richer than what is achievable in JPEG, where only spatially invariant frequency weighting can be exploited. As a result, the visually optimized JPEG2000 images can usually have much better visual quality than the visually optimized JPEG images at the same bit rates. Some visual comparisons between different visual optimization tools, as well as some visual comparisons between JPEG-2000 and JPEG, will be shown.