The recent MPEG 4 and JPEG 2000 standards address the
need for content based coding and manipulation of visual
media. The upcoming MPEG 7 standard proposes content
descriptors, which succinctly describe the visual content for
the purpose of efficient retrieval. This implies that there is
an impending need for efficient and effective joint
compression and indexing approaches. Several compressed
domain indexing techniques have been presented in the
recent literature. These are based on the extraction of
features from the compression parameters to derive the
indices. However, there is little work in the domain of
exploring the use of these features to serve the purposes of
both compression and indexing. In this paper, we propose
a new technique for joint compression and indexing in the
wavelet domain. We note that wavelet based compression
is used in JPEG 2000 and (for texture coding) in MPEG 4.
In the proposed technique, the wavelet decomposed image is
first preprocessed to extract features which are then used for
compressing the image as well as for deriving the indices.
Extensive simulations have been performed in the JPEG
2000 compressed domain to demonstrate the efficiency of
the proposed technique.