An inter-image redundancy measure for image set compression

Image set coding improves the compression efficiency by reducing both intra- and inter-image redundancy. The key of success is to select representative image(s) to predict set of similar images. This paper proposes an inter-image redundancy measure for representative image selection in image set compression. In the proposed method, the inter-image redundancy is measured jointly by the extent of similar content (EOS) and the correlation of similar content (COS) shared in two images. We take the covered area of matched SIFT points to measure the EOS, and take the distance of the matched SIFT descriptors to measure the COS. The image with largest redundancy for the set is selected as the representative one to predict other images. Experimental results show that the proposed method can select better representative image, and achieve bitrate saving up to 9.2% and 20.8% compared with state-of-the-art image set compression method and HEVC inter coding method.