New Transforms for JPEG Format

JPEG, lossy image compression, transform coding, discrete cosine transform, discrete wavelet transform

The paper deals with the incorporation of several suitable transforms into the JPEG compression chain. Block-wise and lapped transfoms were analyzed. The evaluation is performed with respect to the PSNR on a dataset of several hundred images.

The two-dimensional discrete cosine transform (DCT) can be found in the heart of many image compression algorithms. Specifically, the JPEG format uses a lossy form of compression based on that transform. Since the standardization of the JPEG, many other transforms become practical in lossy data compression. This article aims to analyze the use of these transforms as the DCT replacement in the JPEG compression chain. Each transform is examined for different image datasets and subsequently compared to other transforms using the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Our experiments show that an overlapping variation of the DCT, the local cosine transform (LCT), overcame the original block-wise transform at low bitrates. At high bitrates, the discrete wavelet transform employing the Cohen-Daubechies-Feauveau 9/7 wavelet offers about the same compression performance as the DCT.