Patent ID: 7729551

Claim:
A method for controlling the amount of compressed data that is used to represent an image when the image is compressed as a plurality of frequency subbands and subsequently decompressed and viewed on a display by a human observer, comprising the steps of: (a) specifying one or more viewing condition parameters; (b) determining a quantizer step size for each frequency subband that minimizes an amount of data that must be encoded for a compressed representation of the image by using the one or more viewing condition parameters and a model that characterizes the human visual system; (c) using an image processor to compress the image using the quantizer step size for each frequency subband to produce an amount of compressed data; (d) comparing a pre-specified maximum amount of compressed data to the amount of data produced by using the quantizer step size; and (e) if the amount of compressed data exceeds the pre-specified maximum amount, reducing the amount of compressed data by discarding least visually relevant compressed data so that the amount of compressed data is less than or equal to the pre-specified maximum amount.