IEEE Transactions on Image Processing,
vol. 10, no. 10, pp. 1397-1410, Oct. 2001
Embedded Foveation Image
Coding
Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE),
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at
Austin, Austin, TX 78712-1084
Abstract: The human visual system (HVS) is highly
space-variant in sampling, coding, processing and understanding. The spatial
resolution of the HVS is highest around the point of fixation (foveation point)
and decreases rapidly with increasing eccentricity. By taking advantage of this
fact, it is possible to remove considerable high frequency information
redundancy from the peripheral regions and still reconstruct a perceptually
good quality image. Great success has been obtained recently by a class of
embedded wavelet image coding algorithms, such as the embedded zerotree wavelet
(EZW) and the set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithms.
Embedded wavelet coding not only provides very good compression performance,
but also has the property that the bitstream can be truncated at any point and
still be decoded to recreate a reasonably good quality image. In this paper, we
propose an embedded foveation image coding (EFIC) algorithm, which orders the
encoded bitstream to optimize foveated visual quality at arbitrary bit rates. A
foveation-based image quality metric, namely foveated wavelet image quality
index (FWQI), plays an important role in the EFIC system. We also developed a
modified SPIHT algorithm to improve the coding efficiency. Experiments show that
EFIC integrates foveation filtering with foveated image coding and demonstrates
very good coding performance and scalability in terms of foveated image quality
measurement.
Index Terms – image coding, embedded coding, human
visual system, foveation, foveation filtering, foveated image coding, wavelet,
progressive transmission, scalable coding, image quality measurement.