A new quadtree decomposition reconstruction method

Many lossy compression algorithms have been proposed that perform well for low bit rates, but are computationally intense. On the other hand, there are many simple algorithms that perform poorly at high compression ratios. An algorithm that incorporates both computational simplicity and acceptable performance at low bit rates would have many potential applications. In wireless communications, for example, where computing power and transmission speed are important factors, the time required to compress and send image data would need to be reduced significantly. A low bit rate compression algorithm that is conceptually simple as well as computationally efficient is presented in this paper. Theoretically, it can be shown to be computationally superior to JPEG in the compression phase, and comparable in the decompression phase. In practice, the quality of the results, as measured by the PSNR, is found to be better than JPEG results at bit rates lower than about 0.2-0.3 bpp depending on the input image.