Complexity Scalable Bitplane Image Coding with Parallel Coefficient Processing

Very fast image and video codecs are a pursued goal both in the academia and the industry. This paper presents a complexity scalable and parallel bitplane coding engine for wavelet-based image codecs. The proposed method processes the coefficients in parallel, suiting hardware architectures based on vector instructions. Our previous work is extended with a mechanism that provides complexity scalability to the system. Such a feature allows the coder to regulate the throughput achieved at the expense of slightly penalizing compression efficiency. Experimental results suggests that, when using the fastest speed, the method almost doubles the throughput of our previous engine while penalizing compression efficiency by about 10%