Morphological shape representation of segmented images based on temporally modeled motion vectors

Region based coding schemes are among the most promising compression techniques for very low bit-rates. They consist of image segmentation, contour and texture coding. In this paper, a new shape representation for segmented images based on the geodesic morphological skeleton is presented. It is used for the coding of contour prediction residues obtained after motion compensation based on temporally modeled motion vectors. A non-reversible pre-skeletonization filter removes contour noise. A reversible post-skeletonization filter allows progressive transmission of contour information. It is based on the spatial distribution of the skeleton points, which are found to be close to known contours