A Reduced Laplacian Pyramid for Lossless and Progressive Image Communication

The Laplacian pyramid (LP) is appropriate for lossy image compression; conversely, the reduced-difference pyramid (RDP), having as many data as pixels, gives a better performance with lossless encoding. In this letter, a reduced LP is designed by discarding the anti-aliasing filter and adopting a half-band interpolator, thus retaining three over four of the LP coefficients. Lossless coding outperforms both LP and RDP, especially when dealing with medical images.