COPERM: transform-domain energy compaction by optimal permutation

Compaction by optimal permutation (COPERM) is a tool for transform domain energy compaction of broadband signals, whose foundation is a simple but powerful idea: any signal can be transformed to resemble a more desirable (e.g., from a transform-domain compaction viewpoint) signal from a class of "target" signals (e.g., DCT basis functions) by means of a suitable permutation of its samples. One application of transform-domain energy compaction is in lossy compression. We pursue one possible thread in detail and demonstrate some interesting broadband image compression results.