A novel Parallel-Based Lifting Algorithm (PBLA) for Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), exploiting the parallelism of arithmetic operations in all lifting steps, is proposed in this paper. It leads to reduce the critical path latency of computation, and to reduce the complexity of hardware implementation as well. The detailed derivation on the proposed algorithm, as well as the resulting Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) architecture, is introduced, taking the 9/7 DWT as an example but without loss of generality. In comparison with the Conventional Lifting Algorithm Based Implementation (CLABI), the critical path latency of the proposed architecture is reduced by more than half from (4Tm + 8Ta)to Tm + 4Ta, and is competitive to that of Convolution-Based Implementation (CBI), but the new implementation will save significantly in hardware. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed architecture has good performance in both increasing working frequency and reducing area.