Adaptive spline-wavelet image encoding and real-time synthesis

A wavelet-based image-encoding is described which, when used in conjunction with the Difference Engine (a custom-designed VLSI display processor) allows us to reconstruct an image in real-time without the need to set each pixel explicitly. The image is compressed using a quadratic spline-wavelet transform; when reconstructing, an image-adaptive instruction generator attempts to produce the minimal instruction stream to give a good reproduction. The wavelet coefficients are used to decide which regions of the detail images should be retained in the multi-resolution analysis (MRA). A decision is made for each scan-line as to whether it is more economical, in terms of rendering time, to use the `truncated MRA´ or to set the pixels directly. The above approach provides a significant gain over standard image reconstruction/rendering schemes