An improved progressive lossy-to-lossless coding method for arbitrarily-sampled image data

A method for the progressive lossy-to-lossless coding of arbitrarily-sampled image data is proposed. Through experimental results, the proposed method is demonstrated to have a rate-distortion performance that is vastly superior to that of the state-of-the-art image-tree (IT) coding scheme. In particular, at intermediate rates (i.e., in progressive decoding scenarios), the proposed method yields image reconstructions with a peak-signal-to-noise ratio that is much higher (sometimes by several dB) than the IT scheme, while simultaneously achieving a slightly lower lossless rate.