A reduced Laplacian pyramid for lossless and progressive image communication

The Laplacian pyramid (LP) is appropriate for lossy image compression; conversely, the reduced-difference pyramid (RDP), having as many data as pixels, gives a better performance with lossless encoding. A reduced LP is designed by discarding the anti-aliasing filter and adopting a half-band interpolator, thus retaining three over four of the LP coefficients. Lossless coding outperforms both LP and RDP, especially when dealing with medical images.