Improved Wavelets for Image Compression from Unitary Circuits

Abstract: We benchmark the efficacy of several novel orthogonal, symmetric, dilation-3 wavelets, derived from a unitary circuit based construction, towards image compression. The performance of these wavelets is compared across several photo databases against the CDF-9/7 wavelets in terms of the minimum number of non-zero wavelet coefficients needed to obtain a specified image quality, as measured by the multi-scale structural similarity index (MS-SSIM). The new wavelets are found to consistently offer better compression efficiency than the CDF-9/7 wavelets across a broad range of image resolutions and quality requirements, averaging 7-8% improved compression efficiency on high-resolution photo images when high-quality (MS-SSIM = 0.99) is required.