Image sizes have increased exponentially in recent years. The resulting high-resolution images are typically encoded in a lossy fashion to achieve high compression ratios. Lossy compression can be categorized into visually lossless and visually lossy compression depending on the visibility of compression artifacts. This dissertation proposes visually lossless coding methods as well as a visually lossy coding method with perceptual quality control. All resulting codestreams are JPEG2000 Part-I compliant.Visually lossless coding is increasingly considered as an alternative to numerically lossless coding. In order to hide compression artifacts caused by quantization, visibility thresholds (VTs) are measured and used for quantization of subbands in JPEG2000. In this work, VTs are experimentally determined from statistically modeled quantization distortion, which is based on the distribution of wavelet coefficients and the dead-zone quantizer of JPEG2000. The resulting VTs are adjusted for locally changing background through a visual masking model, and then used to determine the minimum number of coding passes to be included in a codestream for visually lossless quality under desired viewing conditions. The proposed coding scheme successfully yields visually lossless images at competitive bitrates compared to those of numerically lossless coding and visually lossless algorithms in the literature.This dissertation also investigates changes in VTs as a function of display resolution and proposes a method which effectively incorporates multiple VTs for various display resolutions into the JPEG2000 framework. The proposed coding method allows for visually lossless decoding at resolutions natively supported by the wavelet transform as well as arbitrary intermediate resolutions, using only a fraction of the full-resolution codestream. When images are browsed remotely, this method can significantly reduce bandwidth usage.Contrary to images encoded in the visually lossless manner, highly compressed images inevitably have visible compression artifacts. To minimize these artifacts, many compression algorithms exploit the varying sensitivity of the human visual system (HVS) to different frequencies, which is typically obtained at the near-threshold level where distortion is just noticeable. However, it is unclear that the same frequency sensitivity applies at the supra-threshold level where distortion is highly visible. In this dissertation, the sensitivity of the HVS for several supra-threshold distortion levels is measured based on the JPEG2000 quantization distortion model. Then, a low-complexity JPEG2000 encoder using the measured sensitivity is described. The proposed visually lossy encoder significantly reduces encoding time while maintaining superior visual quality compared with conventional JPEG2000 encoders.

Stereoscopic 3-D has received considerable attention over the last few decades. Since a stereoscopic 3-D pair includes two 2-D images together, the amount of data for an uncompressed stereo image is double compared to that for an uncompressed 2-D image. Thus efficient compression techniques are of paramount importance. However, crosstalk effect is an inherent perceivable problem in current 3-D display technologies. It can lead not only to degradation in the perceived quality of 3-D images, but also to discomfort in some individuals. Correspondingly, when crosstalk occurs, the compression artifacts in a compressed stereo pair can be perceived, despite the fact that such artifacts are imperceptible in individual left and right images. This dissertation proposes a methodology for visually lossless compression of monochrome stereoscopic 3-D images in which crosstalk effect is carefully considered. In the proposed methodology for visually lossless compression of monochrome stereoscopic 3-D images, visibility thresholds are measured for quantization distortion in JPEG2000 to conceal perceivable compression artifacts. These thresholds are found to be functions of not only spatial frequency, but also of wavelet coefficient variance, as well as the gray level in both the left and right images. In order to avoid a daunting number of measurements of visibility thresholds during subjective experiments, a model for visibility thresholds is developed. The left image and right image of a stereo pair are then compressed jointly using the visibility thresholds obtained from the proposed model to ensure that quantization errors in each image are imperceptible to both eyes. This methodology is then demonstrated via a 3-D stereoscopic liquid crystal display (LCD) system with an associated viewing condition. The resulting images are visually lossless when displayed individually as 2-D images, and also when displayed in stereoscopic 3-D mode. In order to have better perceptual quality of stereoscopic 3-D images, hardware based techniques have been used to reduce crosstalk in 3-D stereoscopic display systems. However, crosstalk is still readily apparent in some 3-D viewing systems. To reduce crosstalk remains after hardware crosstalk compensation, a methodology for crosstalk compensation accomplished via image processing is provided in this dissertation. This methodology focuses on crosstalk compensation of 3-D stereoscopic LCD systems in which active shutter glasses are employed. Subjective experiments indicate that crosstalk is a function of not only the pixel intensity in both the left and right channels, but also of spatial location. Accordingly, look-up tables (LUTs) are developed for spatially-adaptive crosstalk compensation. For a given combination of gray levels in the left and right channels at a specific spatial location, the original pixel values are replaced by values contained in the LUTs. The crosstalk in the resulting stereo pair is significantly reduced, resulting in a significant increase in perceptual image quality.