An embedded scaling-based arbitrary shape region-of-interest coding method for JPEG2000

The shape information of objects is perceptually very significant and can aid in the recognition of objects. Depending upon the bit budget, Internet browsing applications can take advantage of an arbitrary-shape region-of-interest (ROI) coding method by sending only the shape information first, and then progressively transmitting the ROI texture, followed by the less important non-ROI texture information. Unfortunately, the existing ROI coding methods, including the JPEG2000-based methods, do not support separate coding and decoding of the shape information. In particular, the maxshift and the scaling-based methods of JPEG2000 are limited in that the former does not allow the coding of any non-ROI bitplanes prior to the coding of the ROI bitplanes, and the latter supports only rectangular and circular ROIs. The paper presents a novel ROI-based coding method that extends the scaling-based method of JPEG2000, and allows the coding of arbitrary-shape ROIs, as well as the separate coding and transmission of the ROI shape information prior to the texture information. Coding results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed ROI-based coding method.