Summary: Submitted to: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, September 1998
Multi­layered Image Representation:
Application to Image Compression
F.G. Meyer 1 , A.Z. Averbuch 2 , and R.R. Coifman 3
1 Radiology and Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT
2 School of Mathematical Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel
3 Mathematics, Yale University, New Haven, CT
e­mail: francois.meyer@yale.edu
EDICS Category: 2­WAVP
Abstract
The main contribution of this work is a new paradigm for image representation and image
compression. We describe a new multi­layered representation technique for images. An image
is parsed into a superposition of coherent layers: smooth­regions layer, textures layer, etc. The
multi­layered decomposition algorithm consists in a cascade of compressions applied succes­
sively to the image itself and to the residuals that resulted from the previous compressions.
During each iteration of the algorithm, we code the residual part in a lossy way: we only retain
the most significant structures of the residual part, which results in a sparse representation.
Each layer is encoded independently with a different transform, or basis, at a different bitrate;
and the combination of the compressed layers can always be reconstructed in a meaningful
way. The strength of the multi­layer approach comes from the fact that different sets of basis

Source: Averbuch, Amir - School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences