Low bit rate image compression by two layer wavelet and contourlet transforms

Low bit rate applications, such as cell phone and wireless transmission of images, require compression schemes that could keep acceptable levels of visual quality of the medium. In this paper a multi layer compression scheme is presented which is intended to preserve the texture details of an image at low bit rates. The first layer uses wavelet transform for extraction of textures. Then in the second layer the strength of the contourlet transform in preservation of textures is employed to compress the highlighted textures of the image. The proposed method is compared with a number of low bit rate methods and proved to be superior to these methods.