Reduction of transients during lifting based spatial switching of two-channel filter banks

Time/space varying filter banks (FBs) are useful for non-stationary images. Lifting factorization of FBs results in structural perfect reconstruction even during the transition from one FB to other. This allows spatial switching between arbitrary FBs, avoiding the need to design border FBs. However, we show that lifting based switching between arbitrarily designed FBs induces spurious transients in the subbands during the transition. In this paper, we study the transients in lifting based switching of two-channel FBs. We propose two solutions to overcome the transients. One solution consists of a boundary handling mechanism to switch between any arbitrarily designed FBs, while the other solution proposes to design the FBs with a set of conditions applied on lifting steps. Both solutions maintain good frequency response during the transition and eliminate the transients. Using the proposed methods, we develop a spatial adaptive transform by switching between the long length FBs (either the JPEG2000 9/7 FB or the newly designed 13/11 FB) and the short length FBs (JPEG2000 5/3 FB) for lossy image compression. This adaptive transform shows PSNR improvement for images over JPEG2000 9/7 FB in low bit rate region (up to 0.2 bpp) and subjective improvements with reduced ringing up to medium bit rates (up to 0.6 bpp).