A visual attention estimator applied to image subject enhancement and colour and grey level compression

Image segmentation technology has immediate application to compression where image regions can be identified and economically coded for storage or transmission. Normally segmentation identifies regions that are uniform and homogeneous with respect to some characteristic such as colour or texture and ideally these regions coincide with image objects and thereby offer the potential of huge compression ratios. This paper proposes a technique for colour variability reduction that only affects the background material and leaves perceptually important areas unchanged.