Design and performance of a pixel-level pipelined-parallel architecture for high speed wavelet-based image compression

Wavelets have widely been used in many signal and image processing applications. In this paper, a new serial-parallel architecture for wavelet-based image compression is introduced. It is based on a 4-tap wavelet transform, which is realised using some FIFO memory modules implementing a pixel-level pipeline architecture to compress and decompress images. The real filter calculation over 4 × 4 window blocks is done using a tree of carry save adders to ensure the high speed processing required for many applications. The details of implementing both compressor and decompressor sub-systems are given. The primarily analysis reveals that the proposed architecture, implemented using current VLSI technologies, can process a video stream in real time.