Energy Based Quantization for Image Compression Using Contourlet Transform

This paper presents a new compression technique based on Contourlet Transform (CT) and energy based quantization. Double filter bank structure is used in CT. The Laplacian Pyramid (LP) is used to capture the point discontinuities, and then followed by a Directional Filter Bank (DFB) to link point discontinuities. The coefficients of down sampled low pass version of LP decomposed image are re-ordered in a pre-determined manner and prediction algorithm is used to reduce entropy (bits/pixel). In addition, the coefficients of CT are quantized based on the energy in the particular band. The superiority of proposed algorithm to JPEG is observed in terms of reduced blocking artifacts. The results are also compared with wavelet transform (WT). Superiority of CT to WT is observed when the image contains more contours.