Context selection for efficient bit modeling of contourlet transform coefficients

Contourlet transform is named as one possible successor to the wavelet transform as a tool for representation of image information. It has better properties in representation of edge information, which make it suitable for designing image compression systems. It is not clear, however, how to exploit the statistical structure of the coefficients generated by this transform in effective compression algorithm. In this work, authors propose a general, nonparametric method to achieve context map, thus allowing for efficient application of EBCOT/JPEG 2000 bit modeling and encoding approach to contourlet transformed images. The article presents the derivation of the method and experiments performed on a publicly available image set. Keywords: contourlet transform, coefficient bit modeling, context estimation