Patent ID: 7437010

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: an integrated circuit configured to encode a digital image at least in part by transforming a digital image into a wavelet domain to generate a pyramid hierarchy; wherein said integrated circuit is further configured to losslessly encode a top low-low subband of said pyramid hierarchy to obtain a lossless encoded portion of said digital image; wherein said integrated circuit is further configured to vector quantization encode one or more other subbands of said pyramid hierarchy, based on a zerotree insignificance prediction, to obtain a lossy encoded portion of said digital image; wherein said integrated circuit is further configured to output an encoded image, the encoded image being transformed from a combination of said losslessly encoded portion of said digital image and said lossy encoded portion of said digital image; and wherein said integrated circuit is further configured to analyze a plurality of vectors in a threshtree, wherein analyzing said plurality of vectors includes determining a descendent cost, an alternate descendent cost, a significant vector cost, an isolated zero cost and a zerotree cost, the zerotree cost being a combination of the alternate descendent cost and a cost of coding a current vector as a zerotree root.