Evaluation and synthesis of wavelet image coders

The design of a wavelet image coder can be divided into three parts: wavelet representation, quantization, and error-free encoding. We evaluate each of these parts individually and synthesize them into complete coders. The evaluation is in the rate-distortion sense; two image quality metrics are used: a perception-based, quantitative picture quality scale (PQS) and the conventional distortion measure, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Two representative wavelets, three quantizers, three encoders, and some combinations of these parts are comparatively evaluated. Our results provide an insight into the design issues of optimizing wavelet coders, as well as a good reference for application developers to choose from an increasingly large family of wavelet coders for their applications.