Coding of Still Images by Areas of Interest

Abstract

In most image processing applications, the user is only interested in part of the information conveyed through the image. In this paper, we present an adaptive method of compression of still images. It consists first on a semi-automatic extraction of the region of interest (ROI). The background (BG) and the ROI are then processed separately so as to preserve the information in the ROI and degrade in a controlled way the BG. using reversible and irreversible techniques such as JPEG, JPEG 2000 and Run Length Encoding (RLE). Performances of these techniques in terms of compression rate are compared based on their applications to biomedical and satellite images.