Sub-Band Compression of Color Images Using a Perceptual Model

In this paper we present a sub-band coder for true color images that uses an empirically derived perceptual masking model to set the allowable quantization noise-level not only for each sub-band but also for each pixel in a given sub-band. The input image is converted into YIQ space and each channel is passed through a separable Generalized Quadrature Mirror Filterbank (GQMF). This separates the image's frequency content into 4 equal width bands in both the horizontal and vertical dimension, resulting in a representation consisting of 16 sub-bands for each channel.