Weekly projects, December 12th

Project

Implement a hierarchical one- or two- dimensional subband coding scheme and use it to compress images and/or sound. Several decisions has to be made:

Which filters do we use? You may settle for the Haar filter or use more advanced filters, such as these low-pass wavelet filters (the corresponding high-pass filters can be construted using Kieffer 14, equation (8) and (14)).
Do we "wrap around" at the borders?
Which subbands do we choose to further decompose?
How do we quantize the resulting values and how do we encode them? You may want to apply the framework from "lossless data compression".

Experiment with different choices and try to compress images or sound files. As always, measure rate and distortion. If you compress images, how do you compare with SPIHT?