Patent ID: 8483497

Claim:
A method to control a quality of image information comprising: receiving one or more of an image, a sequence of images and a layer of an image; receiving an indication of a desired image quality for a reconstructed version of a compressed version of the one or more of the image, the sequence of images and the layer of the image; commencing compression of the one or more of the image, the sequence of images and the layer of the image including performing a wavelet transform and wavelet coefficient coding; estimating, using one or more of Laplacian, generalized Gaussian, statistical and empirical modeling, distortion caused by one or more of quantization distortion and truncation distortion, wherein the estimating of distortion is performed without measuring the distortion; estimating, using one or more modeling techniques, a quality of the reconstructed version of the one or more of the image, the sequence of images and the layer of the image based on the estimated distortion; automatically comparing, by a processor, the estimated quality to the desired image quality; and outputting the compressed version of the one or more of the image, the sequence of images and the layer of an image that meets the desired image quality.