Incremental Refinement of Computation for the Discrete Wavelet Transform

Contrary to the conventional paradigm of transform decomposition followed by quantization, the authors investigate the computation of two-dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT) under quantized representations of the input source. The proposed method builds upon previous research on approximate signal processing and revisits the concept of incremental refinement of computation: Under a refinement of the source description (with the use of an embedded quantizer), the computation of the forward and inverse transform refines the previously-computed result thereby leading to incremental computation of the output.