The Fast Lifting Wavelet Transform for Image Coding

We show how any discrete wavelet transform or two band subband filtering with finite filters can be decomposed onto a finite sequence of simple filtering steps, which we call lifting steps but that are also known as ladder structures, We present a self-contained derivations, building the decomposition from the basic principles such as the Euclidean algorithm, with a focus on a applying it to wavelet filtering. This factorization provides an alternative for the lattice factorization, with the advantage that it can also be used in the bi-orthogonal, i.e, non-unitary case. Lifting leads to a speed-up when compared to the standard implementation. We show that this lifting scheme can be applied in image compression efficiently