A Multi-threshold Embedded Zerotree Wavelet Coder

Eui-Sung Kang , Toshihisa Tanaka , Tae-Hyung Lee , and Sung-Jea Ko

Anam-dong, Sungbuk-ku, Seoul 136-701 Korea fmagasa, jeeni, sjkog@dali.korea.ac.kr 2Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology Ookayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8552 Japan tanaka@ide.titech.ac.jp
Abstract | In this paper, a novel and simple embedded wavelet coder, called a multi-threshold embedded zerotree wavelet coder, is proposed. The well-known embedded zerotree wavelet (EZW) coder uses the successive approximation quantization (SAQ) process and zerotree structures of wavelet coe cients. The EZW coder scans iteratively whole wavelet coe cients during the SAQ process, which decreases the coding e ciency considerably. In the proposed scheme, we scan only signi cant subbands using the signi cant test with the multi-threshold. The multi-threshold obtained from the coe cient with the maximum magnitude in each subband is used to determine whether a subband has signi cant coe cients or not. Since it is not necessary to encode the insignificant subbands having no signi cant coe cients during the SAQ process, we reduce signi cantly the redundancy generated by scanning higher subbands. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms popular image coders such as EZW and JPEG.

1 Department of Electronics Engineering, Korea University

I. Introduction

Wavelet-based image coding is a promising technique to achieve e cient image coding due to being free from blocking artifacts that block-based image coders produce 1], 2]. Moreover, this technique o ers adaptability to achieve scalability for multimedia and visual communications. Particularly, the embedded coder can achieve exact rate control, since it generates a single bitstream which can be truncated at any desired rate 3], 4]. The major di erence between the embedded coding and the traditional coding lies in the successive approximation quantization where wavelet coefcients greater than a given threshold are assumed to have equal importance and should be transmitted before coe cients with smaller magnitudes. This SAQ scheme adopted by the embedded coder can be e ectively applied to progressive image transmission. In the EZW coder 3], an initial threshold is applied to whole wavelet coe cients. During the SAQ process, each coefcient is classi ed into one of four symbols POS, NEG, ZTR, and IZ. These symbols are losslessly encoded using adaptive arithmetic coding 5]. This process is continued until stopping condition is met. Since the EZW

coder scans whole wavelet coe cients with respect to the current threshold, some redundancy exists in the symbols generated when higher subbands are scanned. In this paper, we propose a novel wavelet coder, which can e ciently reduce the redundancy produced when higher subbands are scanned. While the EZW coder scans whole wavelet coe cients during the SAQ process, the proposed method scans only signi cant subbands according to the results of signi cant test using the multi-threshold. The multi-threshold is a set of coefcients with the maximum magnitude in each subband. This multi-threshold is used to determine whether a subband have signi cant coe cients or not. Since it is not necessary to scan insigni cant subbands having no signi cant coe cients, our approach is not only computationally e cient, but also obtains high coding efciency. Furthermore, our proposed embedded coder can achieve the exact rate control and is utilized for progressive image transmission. This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we review the embedded zerotree coding and successive approximation quantization. In Section III, we demonstrate our novel approach, a multi-threshold embedded zerotree wavelet coder. In Section IV, we present experimental results for our coder, and compare them with other famous methods. Conclusions of this paper are given in Section V.
II. Embedded wavelet image coding

The Shapiro's EZW coder exploits the self-similarity of the wavelet transform image across di erent scales by using a tree structure. The typical wavelet tree structure is de ned recursively as shown in Fig. 1. We call a coe cient at a coarse scale a parent. All coe cients at the next ner scale at the same location and of similar orientation are children. All coe cients at all ner scales at the same location and of similar orientation are descendants. Note that coe cients in the highest subbands and LL subband can not have zerotree structure, This work was supported by the Korea Science and Engineering since they have no children. All the rest coe cients have Foundation (KOSEF) under grant 985-0900-007-2. four children. If a coe cient is small in magnitude with

LL
3

HL
3

HL
2

LH
3

HH
3

HL
1

LH
2

HH
2

t
LH
1

HH
1

Fig. 1. Wavelet tree structure of wavelet transform.

the current pixel is insigni cant, this technique needs to identify whether there are any signi cant descendants. Next, the proposed method using the multithreshold and zerotrees is presented. When we perform a -level wavelet decomposition, the multi-threshold, = f k; = 1 2 3 + 1g is a set of the maximum magnitudes of coe cients in each subband. Let 3i?2 3i?1, and 3i , respectively, represent the maximummagnitude in subbands i i, and i where 1 . And 3N +1 corresponds to the maximum magnitude of coe cients in the subband N . Fig. 2 shows the multi-threshold , = f10 15 50 70g, of a 3-level decomposed image. Next, the initial threshold 0 for the SAQ is selected such that
N M t k ; ; : : :; N ;t t H H ; LH HL i N t LL M ; ; : : :; ; T T

respect to a given threshold, then all of its descendants of the similar orientation in the same spatial location at all ner scales are likely to be small as well. The EZW scheme uses e ectively the SAQ and zerotrees. The SAQ iteratively applies a sequence of thresholds 0 N ?1 to determine signi cance of a coe cient, where i = i?1 2. The initial threshold 0 is chosen so that j j j 2 0 for all the wavelet coe cients j . A coe cient is called signi cant if its amplitude is greater than the threshold i ; otherwise insigni cant. When the parent is insigni cant and its descendants are insigni cant, the tree is called zerotree and the tree node is called zerotree root. A signi cant map is dened as the bitplane indicating whether the coe cient is signi cant or not with respect to the current threshold. The signi cant map is encoded using four symbols, POS, NEG, ZTR, and IZ as positive signi cant, negative signi cant, zerotree root, and isolated zero, respectively, where isolated zero means an insigni cant pixel but there exists one more signi cant descendants. This is called dominant pass. Then, re nement pass1 is performed for the coe cients which have been contained in the signi cant map at earlier iterations. During the th re nement pass, binary symbols (0 or 1) corresponding to the + 1th most signi cant bits of coe cients are produced. Those symbols generated in both dominant pass and re nement pass are encoded using the adaptive arithmetic coder 5]. The encoder halves the threshold and repeats another dominant and re nement pass until a target bitrate is met. More details are explained in 3].
T ; : : :; T T T c = T < T c T i i

0 = 2blog2 C c

(1)

where is the largest magnitude of all the wavelet coe cients and b c represents the largest integer which is not greater than . During each SAQ process, a binary image is generated by applying this threshold to whole wavelet coe cients. In some subbands of the binary image, all the coe cients are equal to zero especially in the rst several quantization processes. At the th iteration, a subband which satis es k i does not need to be scanned. Here, we de ne a signi cant subband as a subband that satis es k and an insigni cant subband as a subband that satis es k . In Fig. 2, shaded subbands indicate signi cant subbands with respect to the current threshold and the other subbands represent insigni cant subbands. To determine which subband is signi cant or insigni cant with respect to the threshold in the decoder, the multi-threshold information should be transmitted to the decoder. To reduce overhead of the multi-threshold information, we transmit k which satis es
C x x i t < T t T t < T n n

k = blog2 tk c

(2)

III. The Proposed Approach

As seen previously, if the current pixel is signi cant, the EZW method needs to scan its children. And if
1 In Shapiro's paper, this pass is called subordinate pass, but we use more general term re nement pass taking other similar algorithms into consideration.

instead of transmitting real coe cient values. In our approach, the zerotree coding is performed like the EZW coder and compression algorithm with reversible embedded wavelets (CREW) 6]. However, we employ binary symbols, 0 for insigni cant pixel and 1 for signi cant one. For a signi cant coe cient, one additional bit is needed to encode the sign of the coe cient. For a insigni cant coe cient, one additional bit is also needed in order to indicate whether the coe cient is zerotree root or not. Like the CREW, POS, NEG, IZ, and ZTR are replaced with 11, 10, 01, and 00, respectively. In our coder, however, the conversion is performed to reduce the redundancy of symbols of the subbands, called the marginal subbands, which are adjacent to insigni cant subbands. Since all the coe cients

t 10 =70 t8 =47

t9 =50 t7 =43

t 6 =30 t 3 =18 t 4 =23

t 10 =70 t8 =47

t9 =50 t7 =43

t 6 =30 t 3 =18 t 4 =23

t 10 =70 t8 =47

t9 =50 t7 =43

t 6 =30

t 3 =18 t 4 =23

t 5 =33

t 5 =33

t 5 =33

t 2 =15

t 1 =10

t 2 =15

t 1 =10

t 2 =15

t 1 =10

(a) 0 = 26
T

(b) 1 = 25
T

(c) 2 = 24
T

Fig. 2. Examples of the multi-threshold and signi cant subbands. Shaded regions indicate signi cant subbands and thick lines indicate the marginal subbands .

in the marginal subbands have no signi cant descendants, we no longer need an additional bit to identify whether those coe cients have signi cant descendants or not. In the EZW and the CREW, if the current coefcient is signi cant, its descendants should be scanned and encoded. This fact implies that our method can offer an e cient scanning which reduces this redundancy. In addition, to encode coe cients in the lowest subband, we use only one bit for each coe cients: 0 for insigni cant pixels and 1 for signi cant ones, because all the coe cients in that subband are identi ed as positive. Binary symbols generated in each pass are encoded by adaptive arithmetic coding. Unlike the EZW, we use the QM-coder 7] which is more computationally e cient than the adaptive arithmetic coding 5] and Q-coder 8]. And it can e ectively exploit the strong correlation of quantized wavelet coe cients. To encode symbols e ciently, the QM-coder employs context modeling 9], 10] which is the set of past sequence of symbols on which the probability of the current symbol is conditioned. For all quantized wavelet coe cients as a sequence of binary symbols 1 2 n, the minimum codelength is given by
x ; x ; : : :; x l l

xP

xN xW xi xS xE

xN xW xi xS xE

(a) Signi cant bit

(b) Sign bit

Fig. 3. Context modeling of the proposed coder. xi is the current pixel and xP is its parent.
S

= f N W E S g. Note that N and W are signi cance bits generated at the current threshold, and E and S are those which are obtained at the previous threshold. And context modeling for a re nement bit consists of only the previous pixel, i.e. = f i?1g.
x ;x ;x ;x x x x x S x

IV. Experimental Results

= ? log2

n Y ( ij i?1 i=1
p x x

;x

i?2; : : : ; x1):
S

(3)

Here, to reduce the problem of estimating the symbol distributions , we should estimate , which is a subsequence of 1 2 n. During the dominant pass of the EZW, the signi cance of the parent coefcient and the previous one are used for context modeling of the current symbol i, that is = f i?1 P g, where P is the parent symbol. Context modeling for our coder is shown in Fig. 3: for a signi cant bit, = f P N W E S g, and for a sign bit,
x ; x ; : : :; x x S x ;x x S x ;x ;x ;x ;x

Coding simulations were performed for the 512 512 grayscale Lena image. We investigated the performance of our proposed approach using the six-scale wavelet decomposition with the 9/7 tap biorthogonal wavelet lter 1]. We utilized the QM-coder to encode the symbols obtained by the scanning process with the multithreshold. We compare the performance of the proposed method with that of the EZW coder, the DCTbased embedded image coder 11], the ACTCQ (arithmetic and entropy constrained trellis quantization) 12], and the JPEG coder 7]. The EZW coder and the DCTbased embedded image coder are the embedded coders. Note that the coding scheme in 7], 12] are not the embedded coder. Fig. 4 shows the original image and the decoded images obtained by our proposed method. It is seen that the decoded images do not produce any block-

(a) Original image

Fig. 4. Original and decoded 512 512 Lena images.

(b) at rate 0.5bpp

(c) at rate 0.25bpp

ing artifacts and exhibit good visual quality. And Fig. 5 shows the rate-distortion performance for the original image. At lower bit rates (below about 0.95bpp), our method appears to produce better results than all the candidates considered in our simulation. At higher bit rates (around 1bpp), only ACTCQ give slightly better performance than the proposed approach. This experimental result shows that our coder outperforms those popular image coders.
V. Conclusions

PSNR[dB]

We have presented an image coding algorithm, a multi-threshold embedded zerotree wavelet coder. This approach utilizes e ciently the multi-threshold and zerotree structures of wavelet coe cients. The proposed method can reduce the redundancy produced when higher subbands are iteratively scanned during the SAQ process. We can also reduce symbol redundancy using the multi-threshold and binary representation of the symbols generated by the SAQ process. Furthermore, since our proposed method produces the fully embedded bitstream like the other embedded coders, it can achieve the exact rate control and can be easily applied to progressive image transmission. It was shown that the proposed coder outperforms well-known image coders such as the EZW coder, the JPEG, and the ACTCQ.
1] 2] 3] 4]

5] I. H. Witten, R. M. Neal, and J. G. Cleary, \Arithmetic coding for data compression," Commun. ACM, vol. 30, pp. 520{ 540, June 1987. 6] A. Zandi, J. D. Allen, E. L. Schwarts, and M. Boliek, \CREW: Compression with reversible embedded wavelets," in Proc. Data Compression Conference, (Snowbird, Utah), pp. 212{221, Mar. 1995. 7] W. B. Pennebakerand L. J. Mitchell, JPEG Still Image Data Compression Standard. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992. 8] W. B. Pennebaker, J. L. Mitchell, G. G. Langdon, and R. B. Arps, \An overview of the basic principles of the Q-coder adaptive binary arithmetic coder," IBM J. Res. Develop., vol. 32, pp. 717{726, Nov. 1988. 9] V. R. Algazi and R. R. Estes, Jr., \Analysis based coding of image transform and subband coe cients," in SPIE, Applications of Digital Image Processing XVII, pp. 11{21, 1995. 10] C. Chrysa s and A. Ortega, \E cient context-based entropy coding for lossy wavelet image compression," in Proc. IEEE Data Compression Conf. '97, pp. 241{250, 1997. 11] Z. Xiong, O. Guleryuz, and M. T. Orchard, \A DCT-based embedded image coder," IEEE Signal Proc. Letters, vol. 3, pp. 289{290, Nov. 1996. 12] R. L. Joshi, V. J. Crump, and T. R. Fischer, \Image subband coding using arithmetic coded trellis coded quantization," IEEE Trans. Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol. 5, pp. 515{523, Dec. 1995.
40 38 36 34 32 30 28 26 24 22 20 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 Rate[bpp] 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 Proposed Shapiro[3] JPEG[7] Xiong et al[11] Joshi et al[12]

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Fig. 5. Comparison of coding performance.