Characteristics analysis of wavelet coefficients and its applications in image compression

Currently, the wavelet transform is widely used in the signal processing domain, especially in the image compression because of its excellent de-correlation property and the redundancy property included in the wavelet coefficients. This paper investigates the redundancy relationships between any two or three components of the wavelet coefficients, the wavelet bases and the original signal. We discuss those contents for every condition according to the continuous form and the discrete form, respectively, by which we also derive a uniform formula which illuminates the inherent connection among the redundancy of the wavelet coefficients, the wavelet bases and the original signals. Finally, we present the application of the wavelet coefficient redundancy property in the still image compression domain and compare the properties of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) with that of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT).