Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization

The encoding of images at high quality is important in a number of applications. We have developed an approach to coding that produces no visible degradation and that we denote as perceptually transparent. Such a technique achieves a modest compression, but still significantly higher than error free codes. Maintaining image quality is not important in the early stages of a progressive scheme, when only a reduced resolution preview is needed. In this paper, we describe a new method for the progressive transmission of high quality still images, that efficiently uses the lower resolution images in the encoding process. Analysis based interpolation is used to estimate the higher resolution image, and reduces the incremental information transmitted at each step. This methodology for high quality image compression is also aimed at obtaining a compressed image of higher perceived quality that the original.