Compressed image processing-a new research area and challenge

Image processing has gone through many years of research and development. But none of these techniques can be applied to compressed images, i.e., the compressed codes. Modern telecommunication and multimedia networks may require image processing and data compression being integrated into one entity. A visual information system is one example in which it is desired that image databases are constructed by storing compressed codes rather than original image pixels in order to save the storage space. Hence new algorithms should be developed for image indexing directly operated on those compressed codes. This paper reports some pioneering work in this direction to show that compressed image processing could well become a new research area and challenge right through the next century