High performance scalable image coding

A high performance scalable image coding algorithm is proposed. The salient features of this algorithm are the ways to form and locate the significant clusters. Thanks to the list structure, the new coding algorithm achieves fine fractional bit-plane coding with negligible additional complexity. Experiments show that it performs comparably or better than the state-of-the-art coders. Furthermore, the exible codec supports both quality and resolution scalability, which is very attractive in many network applications.