Low complexity JPEG2000 rate control through reverse subband scanning order and coding passes concatenation

This letter introduces a new rate control method devised to provide quality scalability to JPEG2000 codestreams containing a single or few quality layers. It is based on a Reverse subband scanning Order and a coding passes Concatenation (ROC) that does not use distortion measures based on the original image. The proposed ROC method allows a flexible rate control when the image has already been encoded, using negligible computational resources and obtaining the same efficiency as when using quality layers. Besides, the proposed ROC can be used in the encoding process to reduce the coder complexity, avoiding to encode unnecessary coding passes and achieving a competitive performance in terms of mean-square error (MSE).