Morphological representation of wavelet data for image coding

Proposes an improved statistical characterization of the field of wavelet coefficients of natural images. Based on this characterization, the authors introduce morphological representation of wavelet data (MRWD), a novel coding framework for both image and video coding applications. MRWD departs from existing wavelet-based coders in its use of a radically different set of primitive operations-non-linear, morphological operations-for efficiently encoding the wavelet data field. Simulation results are very encouraging: a preliminary algorithm based on the morphological data structure is able to achieve about 0.5 dB of gain in SNR over Shapiro´s (1993) state-of-the-art zerotree-based wavelet coder at a coding rate of 1 bpp for the “Lena” image