A New Energy Function for Segmentation and Compression

We propose a new DCT-based energy function E_DCT for object-oriented segmentation and compression. By minimizing E_DCT the best possible split of the image blocks can be found which leads to better segmentation and compression. Consistent motion vectors can be obtained by using an extended 3D energy function, in the spatio-temporal domain, which measures block motion over multiple frames. Tests on images and videos show promising results, where still image compression achieves over 15% improvement over JPEG and video compression achieves similar improvement over MPEG-2.