A Progressive Universal Noiseless Coder

We describe an adaptation of Itoh and Kawabata's universal noiseless coder that allows for progressive transmission of images. The system is based on a tree structure, and codewords stored at internal nodes of the tree allow for early reproductions of the input image. When the encoder reaches a leaf of the tree, it continues transmitting until the compression is lossless. Compression results compare favorably to Ziv-Lempel coding of both images and finely quantized Gaussian sources.