Design and Implementation of a 90nm Low bit-rate Image Compression Core

This paper presents a low-cost, high throughput discrete wavelet transform-based image compressor. The hardware solution proposed here exploits a modified set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithm and ensures that appropriate reconstructed image qualities can be achieved also for compression ratios over 100:1. Obtained results demonstrate that a maximum data rate of about 23 Mpixels/s can be sustained on a 64x64 size tile. In 90 nm technology, the required area is only 1.77 mm². To obtain higher performance, multiples cores can be used in a parallel implementation.