Lossless wavelet image coding using layered coefficient partitioning

A layered coefficient partitioning (LCP) scheme, which splits integer wavelet coefficients into multiple layers is introduced. The multilayer approach provides a better way to exploit the correlation among the coefficients. An image coding algorithm based on LCP is presented. The proposed algorithm gives improvement in both the lossless and lossy coding performance over the existing wavelet transform based lossless image coders. Experimental results show that the proposed LCP coder produces lossless rates competitive to some of the best performing spatial domain lossless coding schemes and constantly outperforms other multirate coders such as S+P and JPEG-2000 by about 3%-4%. The lossy performance improvement is about 1 to 3 dB (PSNR) in the 0.2 to 3.2 bpp range as compared with the S+P coder.