Fast implementation of 3D SPIHT for real-time video compression

In this paper, we propose a fast implementation method of 3D-SPIHT. In the sorting pass of SPIHT, all coefficients on a tree should be compared with a threshold to determine whether a tree is significant or insignificant. However, most coefficients will be checked several times during encoding. Thus, we propose a new method to efficiently determine significance of trees. The proposed method requires an additional matrix, which is calculated before encoding. During the sorting pass, we check the significance of a tree with one comparison using the matrix instead of comparing every coefficient. Experimental results show that the proposed method does not affect the quality of reconstructed images and can save up to 50 % of processing time.