A partially decodable code for scalable compression of super high definition images

Multimedia communication systems using super high definition (SHD) images are widely desired in various communities such as medical imagery, digital museum and libraries and so on. There are, however, many problems in SHD image communication systems, because of high pixel accuracy and high resolution. We considered indispensable functions to be realized in SHD image application systems. These are summarized to three items, i.e. reversibility, scalability and progressibility. This paper proposes a partially decodable coding method for realizing the scalability function. That is to say, when a whole image cannot be displayed on the monitor, a reduced image is displayed at first to select a region of interest. Then image data of the selected region is extracted from the code stream. For this purpose, a kind of partially decodable code should be introduced. We propose a new partially decodable coding method based on Golomb-Rice code