A New Texture Preserving Lossy Image Coder: A Comparison Using the Discrete Wavelet Transform and the Wavelet Based Contourlet Transform

Image coding is one of the most important technologies for what it is call multimedia revolution. The image coding implies a good representation of the images using the least quantity of bits. In order to ensure a good representation, the coder needs to capture significant information of an object of interest in a small description. To solve this problem, in this paper, we present a new lossy image coder which can preserve one of the most important cues of images: the textures. In order to show the ability of texture preserving lossy coder we present tests using typical images, and a comparison between wavelets and the new wavelet based contourlet transform is made. Finally, we present the results obtained using texture image statistics. Our experiments demonstrate that the decompressed images can be used efficiently in future texture processing or classifications tasks.