Efficient encoding of the significance maps in wavelet based image compression

We propose a method for the efficient encoding of the significance maps in wavelet-based image compression. Adopting the significance map encoding part of the morphology-based scheme, we introduce three new features: exploitation of the knowledge of coefficient magnitudes in the parent band; reordering of the residual part of the significance map; and the employment of hierarchical enumerative coding, a new entropy coding method, instead of arithmetic coding. Experimental results show that utilization of these features bring a consistent improvement. The average improvement is around 7.6%.