Practical implementation of subband DCT based coder

At low bit rate, JPEG compression scheme is known for blocking artifacts due to the quantization of the high order discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients. This artifact can be minimized by the application of subband coding. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of a class of subband image coding scheme referred as the subband DCT (SBDCT). Since SBDCT is derived from the DCT algorithm, it is possible to adapt the output bitstream to be decodable by any JPEG decoders. Results show that an efficient and scalable image coding scheme is achievable when implemented with a fixed point digital signal processor (DSP).