Context Tree-Based Image Contour Coding Using a Geometric Prior

From MaRDI portal
Publication:4618580



Abstract: If object contours in images are coded efficiently as side information, then they can facilitate advanced image / video coding techniques, such as graph Fourier transform coding or motion prediction of arbitrarily shaped pixel blocks. In this paper, we study the problem of lossless and lossy compression of detected contours in images. Specifically, we first convert a detected object contour composed of contiguous between-pixel edges to a sequence of directional symbols drawn from a small alphabet. To encode the symbol sequence using arithmetic coding, we compute an optimal variable-length context tree (VCT) mathcalT via a maximum a posterior (MAP) formulation to estimate symbols' conditional probabilities. MAP prevents us from overfitting given a small training set mathcalX of past symbol sequences by identifying a VCT mathcalT that achieves a high likelihood P(mathcalX|mathcalT) of observing mathcalX given mathcalT, and a large geometric prior P(mathcalT) stating that image contours are more often straight than curvy. For the lossy case, we design efficient dynamic programming (DP) algorithms that optimally trade off coding rate of an approximate contour hatmathbfx given a VCT mathcalT with two notions of distortion of hatmathbfx with respect to the original contour mathbfx. To reduce the size of the DP tables, a total suffix tree is derived from a given VCT mathcalT for compact table entry indexing, reducing complexity. Experimental results show that for lossless contour coding, our proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art context-based schemes consistently for both small and large training datasets. For lossy contour coding, our algorithms outperform comparable schemes in the literature in rate-distortion performance.













This page was built for publication: Context Tree-Based Image Contour Coding Using a Geometric Prior

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q4618580)