A Memory-Efficient Progressive JPEG Decoder

Image formats specified by the joint photographic expert group (JPEG) are preferred in many applications, including Internet and digital cameras. Baseline and progressive JPEG are the two of the most popular formats. While the challenge to design a baseline JPEG decoder is mainly the computation complexity, the challenge to design a progressive JPEG decoder imposes on the size of the available working memory and the rate of data transfer between the decoder and the storage. This paper presents a memory-efficient progressive JPEG decoder for embedded systems with limited working memory. Two progressive JPEG rendering flows, one-pass and multi-pass flows, are proposed to improve the most time-consuming data transfer and arithmetic operations during the rendering procedure. The using of dynamically adaptive rendering flow makes proposed progressive JPEG decoder well suited to a wide range of image processing applications in consumer products.