Single-Loop Software Architecture for JPEG 2000

JPEG 2000 is an image coding system based on the discrete wavelet transform. Unfortunately, there exist several major issues with the effective implementation of the codec. For high resolution data decomposed by a separable transform, immensely many CPU cache misses occur. Following the procedure as defined in the standard, the coefficients of a single resolution appears all at once. Consequently, the entropy coder (EBCOT) needs to once again return to the data already touched. We present a software architecture designed for JPEG 2000 coders. The proposed method employs a strip-based data processing technique while it performs a single-pass multi-scale wavelet transform. The overall compression chain is driven by incoming data while the fragments of the resulting bitstream can be produced immediately after loading the corresponding data and additionally in parallel. The method is friendly to the CPU cache and can nicely exploit the SIMD extensions.