Quality and texture analysis of biometric images compressed with second-generation wavelet transforms and SPIHT-Z encoder

Abstract

In biometric systems, compression takes important place especially in order to reduce the size of the information stored or transmitted through the distributed biometric systems. It is also noted that the compression techniques induce loss of information in the compressed images that can affect the effectiveness of biometric systems. The main objective of our contribution is to examine the efficacy of the used method to offer an optimal compression quality in these kind of images without considerable distortion. In order to evaluate the efficacy of the compression process, we use two kinds of evaluation, full-reference image quality assessment and a new proposed textural quality analysis of the compressed images. In this paper, we use a second-generation wavelet transform to improve the compression study in biometric images. The basic idea of this algorithm is the quincunx wavelet transform coupled to a modified progressive encoder called SPIHT-Z encoding.