I was just reading about this topic last night on Maister’s Graphics Adventures: https://themaister.net/blog/2025/06. They created PyroWave, a GPU-accelerated DWT codec in Vulkan compute shaders for performing very low latency game streaming. Very fascinating read, and builds on similar work from their master’s thesis too.
That's basically what VC-2 is, as well as JPEG2000-HT. Wavelets are nice in that they have no need for deblocking since each slice complements one another, and they're simple to calculate.
But this localization means they're horrible for compression since they have bad frequency decomposition properties. JPEG2000 showed that.
