Embedded image coding algorithm for hardware implementation

EZBC algorithm combines the advantages of zeroblock/zerotree coding and context modeling of the subband/wavelet coefficients by utilizing the correlation of inter-band and intra-band. In EZBC, the sophisticated context models were designed for coding quadtree nodes at different levels and subbands. Thus,EZBC outperforms SPHIT and can be competitive with EBCOT in compression efficiency. But a large amount of memory is required to maintain two lists that are used to store the coordinates of the quadtree nodes needed to be coded, also a great amount of operations to read and write the memory are required in each coding pass. These become drawbacks for a hardware implementation. An improved EZBC algorithm based on zeroblock and quadtree, with low complexity and high performance is presented in this paper. The improved algorithm utilizes the significance state table of bitplane nodes and the context look-up table to complete the coding passes and form the context, the comparison reveals that the PSNR results of the proposed algorithm are nearly the same performance as that of EZBC, furthermore,the algorithm requires low memory and reduces the implementation complexity.