Listless zerotree coding for color images

This paper presents a zerotree coding method for color images that uses no lists during encoding and decoding permitting the omission as the lists requirement in Said and Pearlman´s (see IEEE Transactions on Circuit and System for Video Technology, vol.6, no.3, p.243-50, 1996) set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithm. Without the lists, the memory requirement in a VLSI implementation is reduced significantly. This coding algorithm is also developed to reduce the circuit complexity of an implementation. Our experimental results show only a minor reduction of PSNR values when compared with the PSNR values obtained by the SPIHT codec illustrating well the trade-off between memory requirement and hardware simplicity.