The present invention is embodied in a system and method for compressing
image data using a lapped biorthogonal transform (LBT). The present
invention encodes data by generating coefficients using a hierarchical
LBT, reorders the coefficients in a data-independent manner into groups
of similar data, and encodes the reordered coefficients using adaptive
run-length encoding. The hierarchical LBT computes multiresolution
representations. The use of the LBT allows the present invention to
encode image data in a single pass at any desired compression ratio and
to make use of existing discrete cosine transform (DCT) software and
hardware modules for fast processing and easy implementation.
