New Perspectives and Improvements on the Symmetric Extension Filter Bank for Subband/Wavelet Image Compression

In subband/wavelet image coding, size-limited subband decompositions are ordinarily used to avoid increasing the number of samples that need to be coded. To reduce coding distortions that can occur at the borders, the symmetric extension filter bank is typically employed. This paper introduces some new perspectives and improvements to that decomposition. The symmetric extension filter bank is couched in the cyclic frequency domain, providing a framework that accommodates FIR and IIR filters in a natural way, all with perfect reconstruction. IIR filters with both rational and irrational transfer functions can be implemented and, in the context of symmetric extension, can accommodate IIRs that effectively have perfect stopband suppression. Enhancements to the filter bank at a tree-structured system level are also presented and include the application of spectral reversal correction and a transition band normalization approach to designing the constituent filters of the symmetric extension wavelet packet transform.