Adaptivity with near-orthogonality constraint for high compression rates in Lifting Scheme framework

Since few years, Lifting Scheme has proven its utility in compression field. It permits to easily create fast, reversible, separable or no, not necessarily linear, multiresolution analysis for sound, image, video or even 3D graphics. An interesting feature of lifting scheme is the ability to build adaptive transforms for compression, more easily than with other decompositions. Many works have already be done in this subject, especially in lossless or near-lossless compression framework : better compression than with usually used methods can be obtained. However, most of the techniques used in adaptive near-lossless compression can not be extended to higher lossy compression rates, even in the simplest cases. Indeed, this is due to the quantization error introduced before coding, which has not controlled propagation through inverse transform. Authors have put their interest to the classical Lifting Scheme, with linear convolution filters, but they studied criterions to maintain a high level of adaptivity and a good error propagation through inverse transform. This article aims to present relatively simple criterion to obtain filters able to build image and video compression with high compression rate, tested here with the Spiht coder. For this, upgrade and predict filters are simultaneously adapted thanks to a constrained least-square method. The constraint consists in a near-orthogonality inequality, letting sufficiently high level of adaptivity. Some compression results are given, illustrating relevance of this method, even with short filters.