Wavelets have widely been used in many signal and image processing applications. In this paper, a new
serial-parallel architecture for wavelet-based image compression is introduced. It is based on a 4-tap wavelet
transform, which is realised using some FIFO memory modules implementing a pixel-level pipeline
architecture to compress and decompress images. The real filter calculation over 4 · 4 window blocks is
done using a tree of carry save adders to ensure the high speed processing required for many applications.
The details of implementing both compressor and decompressor sub-systems are given. The primarily analysis
reveals that the proposed architecture, implemented using current VLSI technologies, can process a
video stream in real time.
