A lossless image streaming system for the transmission of images over a communication
network. The system eliminates the necessity to store a compressed version of the
original image, by losslessly streaming ROI data using the original stored image.
The imaging system also avoids the computationally intensive task of compression
of the full image. When a user wishes to interact with a remote image, the imaging
client generates and sends a ROI request list to the imaging server. The request
list can be ordered according to the particular progressive mode selected (e.g.,
progressive by quality, resolution or spatial order). The imaging server performs
a fast preprocessing step in near real time after which it can respond to any ROI
requests in near real time. When a ROI request arrives at the server, a sophisticated
progressive image encoding algorithm is performed, but not for the full image.
Instead, the encoding algorithm is performed only for the ROI. Since the size of
the ROI is bounded by the size and resolution of the viewing device at the client
and not by the size of the image, only a small portion of the full progressive
coding computation is performed for a local area of the original image.