[mistercow]

Yes to the first part, but both the DWT and DCT are linearly separable, so you can compare their performance by just looking at one dimension.

As for the zigzag path, it doesn't run through the 64 pixels, but rather through the 64 coefficients that come out of the DCT. That's part of the coding stage, which is a separate animal. That said, JPEG's coding scheme is way simpler, and probably way faster than JPEG 2000's, so that might also have something to do with the perf difference.

My overall impression of JPEG 2000 is that it seems like they started with "wavelets can surely be used to achieve superior image compression to JPEG", and then made whatever sacrifices were necessary, in terms of implementation complexity and computational resources, to bear out that premise. You could make similar sacrifices and beat the hell out of JPEG with a DCT-based codec too (e.g. with larger windows, overlapping transforms, better psychovisual models etc.)

[kragen]

I see! That makes more sense. Thank you for explaining?

A linearly-separated 2D 8×8 DFT should involve 6 butterflies per pixel, no? And I guess a 2D DWT with 8 coefficients results in 16 multiply-accumulates per pixel? Does it depend on the order of the DWT?

[mistercow]

> Does it depend on the order of the DWT?

Not sure what you mean by the order of the DWT. Do you mean how deep you transform (how many levels of the transform you apply), or the number of taps on the filter?

It definitely depends on the number of taps on the filter.

IIRC, as for the depth DWT down to one scale coefficient is still O(N) (although there's another constant factor multiplied on beyond the number of filter coefficients). Even if you only do two levels, I believe you only cut the time in half, and you lose a lot of opportunity for compression if you do. I'm not sure what depth JPEG 2000 goes to, but it's probably more than three, so I think you can largely discount any perf gains there.

[kragen]

I meant the depth. Thank you!