Listless zerotree coding for color images

This paper presents a zerotree coding method for color images that uses no lists during encoding and decoding, permitting the omission of the lists requirement in Said and Pearlman's Set Partitioning In Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) algorithm [3]. Without the lists, the memory requirement in a VLSI implementation is reduced significantly. This coding algorithm is also developed to reduce the circuit complexity of an implementation. Our experimental results show only a minor reduction of PSNR values when compared with the PSNR values obtained by the SPIHT codec illustrating well the trade-off between memory requirement and hardware simplicity.