    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    ---          EPIC (Efficient Pyramid Image Coder)                  ---
    ---  Designed by Eero P. Simoncelli and Edward H. Adelson          ---
    ---             Written by Eero P. Simoncelli                      ---
    ---  Developed at the Vision Science Group, The Media Laboratory   ---
    --- Copyright 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, Massachusetts Institute of   ---
    ---    Technology.  Copyright 1993, 1994, 1995 University of       ---
    ---          Pennsylvania.   All rights reserved.                  ---
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Permission to use, copy, or modify this software and its documentation for
educational and research purposes only and without fee is hereby granted,
provided that this copyright notice and the original authors' names appear on
all copies and supporting documentation.  For any other uses of this software,
in original or modified form, including but not limited to distribution in
whole or in part, specific prior permission must be obtained from M.I.T. and
the authors.  These programs shall not be used, rewritten, or adapted as the
basis of a commercial software or hardware product without first obtaining
appropriate licenses from M.I.T.  M.I.T.  makes no representations about the
suitability of this software for any purpose.  It is provided "as is" without
express or implied warranty.
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------

EPIC (Efficient Pyramid Image Coder) is an experimental image data compression
utility written in the C programming language.  The compression algorithms are
based on a biorthogonal critically-sampled dyadic wavelet decomposition and a
combined run-length/Huffman entropy coder.  The filters have been designed to
allow extremely fast decoding on conventional (ie, non-floating point) hardware,
at the expense of slower encoding and a slight degradation in compression
quality (as compared to a good orthogonal wavelet decomposition).

We are making this code available to interested researchers who wish to
experiment with a subband pyramid coder.  We have attempted to optimize the
speed of pyramid reconstruction, but the code has not been otherwise optimized,
either for speed or compression quality.  In particular, the pyramid
construction process is unnecessarily slow, quantization binsizes are chosen to
be the same for each subband, and we have used a very simple scalar entropy
coding scheme to compress the quantized subbands.  Although this coding
technique provides good coding performance, a more sophisticated coding scheme
(e.g., utilizing an arithmetic coder, or a vector quantizer) combined with this
pyramid decomposition could result in substantial coding gains.  EPIC is
currently limited to 8-bit monochrome images, and does not explicitly provide 
a progressive transmission capability.

EPIC is available via anonymous ftp from ftp.cis.upenn.edu (IP number
158.130.12.3) in the file pub/eero/epic.tar.Z.  This is a
unix-compressed tarfile: don't forget to put ftp into BINARY mode.

EPIC is also available via the World Wide Web at the following URL:
   http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~eero/epic.html

See the file USAGE for detailed instructions on installing/using EPIC.  
See the file ChangeLog for recent changes to EPIC.

If you acquire a copy of EPIC and make use of it in your research,
please consider referencing some of the publications described below.
Comments, suggestions, or questions should be sent to:

  Prof. Eero P. Simoncelli
  GRASP Laboratory, Rm 335C
  3401 Walnut Street
  Philadelphia, PA  19104-6228

  E-mail: eero@central.cis.upenn.edu
     WWW: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~eero/home.html

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REFERENCES:

Edward H Adelson, Eero P Simoncelli, and Rajesh Hingorani.  Orthogonal
   pyramid transforms for image coding.  In Proceedings of SPIE,
   October 1987, Volume 845. 
   [ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/eero/adelson87.ps.gz]

Eero P. Simoncelli.  Orthogonal Sub-band Image Transforms.  Master's Thesis,
   EECS Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. May, 1988.
   Also available as  MIT Media Laboratory Vision and Modeling
   Technical Report #100.

Edward H Adelson and Eero P Simoncelli, "Truncated Subband Coding of
   Images".  U.S. Patent Number 4,917,812.  1989.

Eero P Simoncelli and Edward H Adelson.  Subband Transforms. Chapter 4 
   of "Subband Image Coding", ed. John Woods.  Kluwer Academic Publishers, 
   1990.  [ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/eero/simoncelli90.ps.Z]

Edward H Adelson, Eero P Simoncelli.  Subband Image Coding with
   Three-tap Pyramids.  Picture Coding Symposium, 1990.  Cambridge, MA. 
   [ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/eero/EPIC.ps.Z]
