The 2-D orthogonal wavelet transform decomposes images into both spatial and spectrally local coefficients. The transformed coefficients were coded hierarchically and individually quantized in accordance with the local estimated noise sensitivity of the human visual system (HVS). The algorithm can be mapped easily onto VLSI. For the Miss America and Lena monochrome images, the technique gave high to acceptable quality reconstruction at compression ratios of 0.3-0.2 and 0.64-0.43 bits per pixel (bpp), respectively.

A new method of video coding gives better picture quality than CCITT standard H.261 whilst being relatively inexpensive to implement with semi-custom and DSP based hardware. The 2-D wavelet transform is followed by a hierarchical coding scheme derived from a model of human visual perception.>