Said and Pearlman's Set Partitioned Embedded block (SPECK) algorithm is computationally simple and efficient for image compression and progressive transmission

however there is a main drawback of high memory requirement for hardware implementation.We propose a new low memory embedded block coder that keeps those desirable features

and the novelties are twofold.A compact form of the flag maps is introduced to store the significant coefficients and sorting information instead of using lists.A new block depth-finding strategy is developed for searching insignificant sets at sorting stage.Experimental results show that the obtained PSNR values for the decoded images are very close to those of SPECK algorithm and the memory consumption is reduced by 12 times.Compared with another low memory coder (Listless Zerotree Coder

LZC)

the PSNR of our algorithm improves at least 1.1dB with a minor increase of memory requirement.This provides an efficient way for hardware implementation of wavelet embedded block coding.