On EZW encoding of surveillance imagery matched for spatial scale on viewer resolution

Embedded zerotree wavelet (EZW) image coding is efficient and uses significance ordering for coefficients. EZW encoding can be arbitrarily terminated resulting in high compression ratios with satisfactory image quality. Given a requested scale for an image section matched to the resolution of the viewer, when can the EZW encoding be terminated and how can a specified quality for the image representation be obtained? One can compute the effect from the aliasing of higher frequencies. The aliased signals are in the cut-off band of the analysis quadrature mirror filter. The more significant, and therefore earlier, EZW coefficients produce the majority of the alias error. So the encoding can be terminated once a specified residue alias error is reached. Then the update of the full precision of the relevant discrete wavelet transform coefficients for that scale are required to provide image representation on the viewer with low or no distortion