A level-plane coding scheme for progressive transmission of gray-scale images

An efficient coding scheme for progressive transmission of gray-scale images is presented. In the scheme, a rough sketch of an image is transmitted first and the details are added later. At the final stage of transmission, a receiver can reproduce the exact replica of an original image with high coding efficiency. This kind of presentation is especially desirable for the interactive visual search of large image databases, where a viewer can recognize image content as quickly as possible, halt transmission of unwanted detail, and retry another image. This scheme utilizes subsampling and level-plane coding in a recursive way. Thus, the coding algorithm is simple and can be easily implemented even on a personal computer. Computer simulations show that the scheme achieves the mean code length of 5.24 b/pel for an image, which is almost the same as that of efficient nonprogressive coding schemes.<
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