Rate-distortion development for optimal truncation in JPEG2000 imagery

This paper presents a development of the post compression rate-distortion optimization (PCRD-opt) algorithm in JPEG2000 used for optimal truncation (OT) rate control. The proposed treatment of PCRD-opt differs from the treatment given in the JPEG2000 standard and what is given in a number of publications, indicating an error in the published literature. The proposed algorithm is implemented in a complete JPEG2000 compression engine as well as the algorithm published in the JPEG2000 standard. The proposed algorithm gives a substantial performance gain, out performing the implementation given in the standard by 0.25-1 dB in PSNR on average, demonstrating that the method for PCRD-opt given in the standard is incorrect. The proposed algorithm is also compared to the JPEG2000 reference implementation, JasPer, and the popular Kakadu JPEG2000 compressor. The proposed algorithm provides equivalent performance results to both JasPer and Kakadu, indicating that the proposed PCRD-opt treatment provides correct OT of JPEG2000 compressed imagery.