Passport photo compression technique with JPEG2000

A formal facial image compression algorithm in JPEG2000 standard coding is proposed in this paper. Object segmentation technique is used to locate the facial region firstly. Greyscale and projection are applied. By the analysis of minima and maxima, facial features are extracted and located. Secondly, the background is reassigned to decrease those less valuable information in final bitstream. Finally, the facial region is compressed using the region of interest coding technique in JPEG2000. The produced bitstream is totally compatible with the JPEG2000 standard one. As a result, the image compressed by the proposal algorithm could be delivered widely and browsed by many picture tools that support JPEG2000 format. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the method.