Image Compression Using Fast Wavelet Transform

In general, image compression reduces the number bits required to represent an image. The main significance of image compression is that the quality of the image is preserved. This in turn increases the storage space and thereby the volume of the data that can be stored. Image compression is the application of data compression technique on digital images. Wavelet Transform based image compression remain the most common among diverse techniques proposed earlier. Data compression which can be lossy or lossless is required to decrease the storage requirement and better data transfer rate. One of the best image compression techniques is using wavelet transform. It is comparatively new and has many advantages over others. Wavelet transform uses a large variety of wavelets for decomposition of images. The state of the art coding techniques like EZW, SPIHT (set partitioning in hierarchical trees) and EBCOT(embedded block coding with optimized truncation)use the wavelet transform as basic and common step for their own further technical advantages. The wavelet transform results therefore have the importance which is dependent on the type of wavelet used .In our thesis we have used different wavelets to perform the transform of a test image and the results have been discussed and analyzed. For the implementation of this proposed work we use Image Processing Toolbox under the Matlab software.