An efficient implementation of hierarchical image coding

An efficient technique for hierarchical image coding is proposed, which divides an image into its multiple resolution versions with minimum hardware cost. Since the proposed technique uses a discrete cosine transform (DCT) over each frequency band data, obtained directly from the DCT domain by multiplying precalculated matrices, compatibility can be preserved easily with DCT-based image/video standards. First, we present the 1D case, followed by an extension to the 2D case. The proposed coder is observed to result in significant reduction of memory and computational complexity requirement with higher peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), when compared with traditional hierarchical image coding methods.