This article is part of the series Wavelets in Source Coding, Communications, and Networks.

Open Access Research Article

Costs and Advantages of Object-Based Image Coding with Shape-Adaptive Wavelet Transform

Marco Cagnazzo*, Sara Parrilli, Giovanni Poggi and Luisa Verdoliva

Author Affiliations

Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettronica e delle Telecomunicazioni, Università Federico II di Napoli, Via Claudio 21, Napoli 80125, Italy

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EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing 2007, 2007:078323 doi:10.1155/2007/78323


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jivp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2007/1/078323


Received:19 August 2006
Revisions received:27 November 2006
Accepted:5 January 2007
Published:11 March 2007

© 2007 Cagnazzo et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Object-based image coding is drawing a great attention for the many opportunities it offers to high-level applications. In terms of rate-distortion performance, however, its value is still uncertain, because the gains provided by an accurate image segmentation are balanced by the inefficiency of coding objects of arbitrary shape, with losses that depend on both the coding scheme and the object geometry. This work aims at measuring rate-distortion costs and gains for a wavelet-based shape-adaptive encoder similar to the shape-adaptive texture coder adopted in MPEG-4. The analysis of the rate-distortion curves obtained in several experiments provides insight about what performance gains and losses can be expected in various operative conditions and shows the potential of such an approach for image coding.

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