Retrieval and progressive transmission of wavelet compressed images

We examine the use of state-of-the-art wavelet coding techniques for content-based image retrieval in this research. It is shown that wavelet features, including the wavelet packet decomposition tree and the number of significant wavelet coefficients in each subband, serve as good indicators of image contents. By adopting these wavelet coding features, images can be compressed and indexed simultaneously, thus decreasing the complexity of database management. This technique finds applications in hierarchical retrieval and browsing of the image database, and facilitates the progressive transmission of retrieved images. Experiments are performed to demonstrate the retrieval efficiency of our new method