Fast Wavelet Transform Algorithms With Low Memory Requirements

In this paper, a new algorithm to efficiently compute the two-dimensional wavelet transform is presented. This algorithm aims at low memory consumption and reduced complexity, meeting these requirements by means of line-by-line processing. In this proposal,we use recursion to automatically place the order in which the wavelet transform is computed. This way, we solve some synchronization problems that have not been tackled byprevious proposals. Furthermore, unlike other similar proposals, our proposal can be straightforwardly implemented from the algorithm description. To this end, a general algorithm is given which is further detailed to allow its implementation with a simple filterbank or using the more efficient lifting scheme. We also include a new fast run-length encoder to be used along with the proposed wavelet transform for fast image compression and reduced memory consumption.