Costs and advantages of shape-adaptive wavelet transform for region-based image coding

Region-based encoding techniques have been long investigated for the compression of still images and video sequences and have recently gained much popularity, as testified by the object-based nature of the MPEG-4 video coding standard. This work aims at analyzing costs and advantages of implementing such an approach by shape-adaptive wavelet transform and shape-adaptive SPIHT. The analysis of several performance measures in a number of experiments confirm the potential of wavelet-based region-based approach, and provide insight about what performance gains and losses can be expected in various operative conditions.