A New Image Coding Technique with Low Entropy

We introduce a new zerotree scheme that effectively exploits the inter-scale self-similarities found in the octave decomposition by a wavelet transform. A zerotree is useful to efficiently code wavelet coefficients and its efficiency was proved by Shapiro's EZW. In the coding scheme, wavelet coefficients are symbolized and entropy-coded for more compression. The entropy per symbol is determined from the produced symbols and the final coded size is calculated by multiplying the entropy and the total number of symbols. In this paper, were analyze produced symbols from the EZW and discuss the entropy per symbol. Since the entropy depends on the produced symbols, we modify the procedure of symbolic streaming out for the purpose. First, we extend the relation between a parent and children used in the EZW to raise a probability that a significant parent has significant children. The proposed relation is flexibly extended according to the fact that a significant coefficient is highly addressed to have significant coefficients in its neighborhood. The extension way is reasonable because an image is decomposed by convolutions with a wavelet filter and thus neighboring coefficients are not independent with each other.