Cache issues with JPEG-2000 wavelet lifting

In this paper, we have a close look at the runtime performance of the intra-component transform employed in the reference implementations of the JPEG2000 image coding standard. Typically, wavelet lifting is used to obtain a wavelet decomposition of the source image in a computationally efficient way. However, so far no attention has been paid to the impact of the CPU's memory cache on the overall performance. We propose two simple techniques that dramatically reduce the number of cache misses and cut column filtering runtime by a factor of 10. Theoretical estimates as well as experimental results on a number of hardware platforms show the effectivity of our approach.