A novel design of criticially sampled contourlet transform and its application to image coding

In this paper, a novel design method of critically sampled contourlet transform (CSCT) is proposed. Although, several types of CSCT have been proposed, they have some problems on efficiency and flexibility of their frequency plane partition patterns. In contrast to the way in conventional design methods based on a "top-down" approach, the proposed one is based on a "bottom-up" one. That is, the proposed CSCT decomposes the frequency plane into small directional sub- bands, and then synthesizes them up to a target frequency plane partition, while the conventional ones decompose into it directly. By this way, the proposed CSCT can provide an efficient and flexible frequency plane partition for image coding.