After a short review of IIR-based subband coders, we describe the features of a software implementation of an efficient image subband coder (SBC). The efficiency of an SBC is heavily dependent upon the filter bank implementation. Experience has shown that at least 90% of the execution time of SBCs is spent in the filter bank. First, we present our implementation based on extremely simple multiplier-free IIR filters. Subsequently, we discuss the implementation task from a programmer's point of view, emphasizing the algorithm implementation using only integer arithmetic. The experiments show that our IIR SBC's execution time is ten times faster than that of an efficient SBC based on FIR filter banks. Furthermore, our codes is twice as fast as the July 91 release of the Free Software Foundation's JPEG implementation, while maintaining comparable performance; our SBC- coded images had somewhat higher signal to noise ratio than those coded with JPEG at the same bit rate. The subjective quality was found to be comparable.

Date Published: 19 May 1992
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 1657, Image Processing Algorithms and Techniques III, (19 May 1992); doi: 10.1117/12.58308

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1657:
Image Processing Algorithms and Techniques III
James R. Sullivan; Benjamin M. Dawson; Majid Rabbani, Editor(s)