Highly Scalable Compression with Embedded Block Coding

Abstract

Following the notation of Chapter 1, we write c for the compressed bit-stream representing the source, x. An “elementary embedded bit-stream” (or simply “embedded bit-stream”), c, has the property that every L-bit prefix, c _0:L , is itself an efficient compressed representation of the source. The distortion, D ^(L), should be comparable to that which might be expected from any practical compression scheme, embedded or otherwise, producing a bit-stream with a similar length, L. A natural and in fact inevitable tool for the construction of embedded bit-streams is embedded quantization, as discussed in Sections 3.2.6 and 3.4.4.