Skipping Selected Steps of DWT Computation in Lossless JPEG 2000 for Improved Bitrates

In order to improve bitrates of lossless JPEG 2000, we propose to modify the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) by skipping selected steps of its computation. We employ a heuristic to construct the skipped steps DWT (SS-DWT) in an image-adaptive way and define fixed SS-DWT variants. For a large and diverse set of images, we find that SS-DWT significantly improves bitrates of non-photographic images. From a practical standpoint, the most interesting results are obtained by applying entropy estimation of coding effects for selecting among the fixed SS-DWT variants. This way we get the compression scheme that, as opposed to the general SS-DWT case, is compliant with the JPEG 2000 part 2 standard. It provides average bitrate improvement of roughly 5% for the entire test-set, whereas the overall compression time becomes only 3% greater than that of the unmodified JPEG 2000. Bitrates of photographic and non-photographic images are improved by roughly 0.5% and 14%, respectively. At a significantly increased cost of exploiting a heuristic, selecting the steps to be skipped based on the actual bitrate instead of an estimated one, and by applying reversible denoising and lifting steps to SS-DWT, we have attained greater bitrate improvements of up to about 17.5% for non-photographic images.