Wavelet Image Coding according to the Activity Regions

활성 영역에 따른 웨이브렛 영상 부호화

  • Park, Jeong-Ho (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) ;
  • Kim, Dae-Jung (Dept.of Computer Engineering, Chonbuk National University) ;
  • Gwak, Hun-Seong (Dept.of Computer Engineering, Chonbuk National University)
  • Published : 2002.03.01

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new method for image coding which efficiently use the relationship between the properties of spatial image and its wavelet transform. Firstly, an original image is decomposed into several layers by the wavelet transform, and simultaneously decomposed into 2$^n$$\times$2$^n$blocks. Each block is classified into two regions according to their standard deviation, i.e., low activity region(LAR) and high activity region(HAR). The region with low frequency in spatial domain does not only appears as zero regions in wavelet frequency domain like HL, LH, and HH but also gives little influence to the quality of reconstructed image. The other side, the high frequency regions are related to significant coefficients which gives much influence to image reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a image coding method to obtain high compression rate at low bit rate by these properties. The LAR region is encoded by LAR coding method which is proposed in this paper, the HAR by a technique similar to bitplane coding in hierarchical tree. Simulation results show that th,$\boxUl$ proposed coding method has better performance than EZW and SPIHT schemes in terms of image quality and transmitted bit rates, can be successfully applied to the application areas that require of progressive transmission.

본 논문에서는 공간 영상의 특성과 웨이브렛 변환 사이의 상관 관계를 이용한 새로운 영상 부호화 기법을 제안한다. 제안한 방법은 먼저 윈 영상을 2ⁿ×2ⁿ 크기의 블록으로 분할 한 후, 각 블록의 표준편차에 따라 변화가 없는 활성 영역(LAR)과 변화가 큰 활성 영역(HAR)으로 분류한다. 공간영역에서 저주파수 영역은 웨이브렛 변환 대역에서 zero region으로 나타나며, 영상의 복원에 큰 영향을 미치지 않는 특성을 가지고 있다. 반면, 고주파수 영역은 영상의 복원에 있어 큰 영향을 미치는 중요계수와 관련이 있다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 특성들을 이용하여 낮-은 비트율에서도 높은 압축률을 얻을 수 있는 부호화 기법을 제안한다. 영상 부호화를 위해 저주파수 영역은 본 논문에서 제안한 LAR 부호화 기법을 적용하고 고주파수 영역의 효율적인 부호화를 위해 계층적 트리에서 비트플레인 부호화 방식과 유사한 형태의 방법을 제안하고 이를 적용하였다. 실험결과 제안한 부호화 기법은 EZW 및 SPIHT 방식에 비해 복원화질 및 전송 비트율 모두 좋은 결과를 나타냄을 확인하였으며 점진적 전송이 요구되는 분야에 적용될 수 있을 것으로 예상한다.

Keywords

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