Method of compressing digital images

摘要

A method of compressing digital representations of images stores the images in multiple subsampling quality scales in a progressive manner such that a higher quality scale contains only data incremental to the data in an adjacent lower quality scale. The data in each quality scale is transformed, quantized, and entropy encoded. A discrete wavelet cosine transformation combining frequency transformation features of a discrete cosine transformation and spatial transformation features of a wavelet transformation is provided. Sequences of subsampling quality scales are provided for multi-scale representations of images. A novel context selection method is used which treats color components and coefficients of different positions differently. An image compressed in a given quality scale can be transmitted or decompressed progressively allowing progressive downloading or transmission over the Internet.