JPEG 2000 Extensions for Scalable Coding of Discontinuous Media

In this paper we propose novel extensions to JPEG 2000 for the coding of discontinuous media which includes piecewise smooth imagery such as depth maps and optical flows. These extensions use breakpoints to model discontinuity boundary geometry and apply a breakpoint dependent Discrete Wavelet Transform (BP-DWT) to the input imagery. The highly scalable and accessible coding features provided by the JPEG 2000 compression framework are preserved by our proposed extensions, with the breakpoint and transform components encoded as independent bit streams that can be progressively decoded. Comparative rate-distortion results are provided along with corresponding visual examples which highlight the advantages of using breakpoint representations with accompanying BD-DWT and embedded bit-plane coding. Recently our proposed extensions have been adopted and are in the process of being published as a new Part 17 to the JPEG 2000 family of coding standards.