The discrete wavelet transform can be found at the heart of many image-processing algorithms. Until now, the transform on general-purpose processors (CPUs) was mostly computed using a separable lifting scheme. As the lifting scheme consists of a small number of operations, it is preferred for processing using single-core CPUs. However, considering a parallel processing using multi-core processors, this scheme is inappropriate due to a large number of steps. On such architectures, the number of steps corresponds to the number of points that represent the exchange of data. Consequently, these points often form a performance bottleneck. Our approach appropriately rearranges calculations inside the transform, and thereby reduces the number of steps. In other words, we propose a new scheme that is friendly to parallel environments. When evaluating on multi-core CPUs, we consistently overcome the original lifting scheme. The evaluation was performed on 61-core Intel Xeon Phi and 8-core Intel Xeon processors.
The DWT splits the input signal into two components, according to a parity of its samples. The components are often referred to as L and H. The transform can be computed by a pair of quadrature mirror filters, referred to as G, followed by subsampling by a factor of 2. Formally, this can be represented by the polyphase matrix , where operators @math and @math denote the even and odd terms of @math . This equation defines one-dimensional convolution scheme. Further, Sweldens showed @cite_3 how the convolution scheme can be decomposed into a sequence of simple steps. These filters are referred to as the lifting steps and the scheme as the lifting scheme. The following paragraph discusses the lifting scheme in detail.
@cite_3
2015370045
This article is essentially tutorial in nature. We show how any discrete wavelet transform or two band subband filtering with finite filters can be decomposed into a finite sequence of simple filtering steps, which we call lifting steps but that are also known as ladder structures. This decomposition corresponds to a factorization of the polyphase matrix of the wavelet or subband filters into elementary matrices. That such a factorization is possible is well-known to algebraists (and expressed by the formula SL(n; R(Z, z-I)) = E(n; R(z, z-l))); it is also used in linear systems theory in the electrical engineering community. We present here a self-contained derivation, building the decomposition from basic principles such as the Euclidean algorithm, with a focus on applying it to wavelet filtering. This factorization provides an alternative for the lattice factorization, with the advantage that it can also be used in the biorthogonal, i.e., non-unitary case. Like the lattice factorization, the decomposition presented here asymptotically reduces the computational complexity of the transform by a factor two. It has other applications, such as the possibility of defining a wavelet-like transform that maps integers to integers.