Wavelet Transform: A Recent Image Compression Algorithm

Digital imaging has had an enormous impact on scientific and industrial applications. Uncompressed images require considerable storage capacity and transmission bandwidth. The solution to this problem is to compress an image for desired application. There are two different compression categories : lossless and lossy . Lossless compression preserves the information in the image. Thus an image could be compressed and decompressed without loosing any information. Lossy compression is useful in areas such a video conferencing, fax or multimedia applications and is the focus of this paper. Discrete cosine and wavelet transforms, the work horses of JPEG-93 And JPEG-2000, respectively. This paper focus on the use of the twodimensional wavelet transform over images, which are represented as a two dimensional array of numbers.