A SCALABLE, PROGRESSIVE IMAGE COMPRESSION AND ARCHIVING SYSTEM OVER A LOW BIT RATE INTERNET PROTOCOL NETWORK

摘要

An on-demand, interactive, scalable, image data compressor, data archiving, transmission and presentation system comprising a server, a compression engine, memory and user interface capable of communicating with the server is described. The compression engine provides progressive transmission of a compressed image and provides both a tree based compression method and a context based, code block encoding compression method, either of which are selectable by the user on demand. The compression engine can switch automatically from a lossy compression to a lossless compression to achieve a desired quality of decompressed images.