With desktop imaging devices becoming ubiquitous, effectively managing the images in large collections has become a challenge. The requirements for a modern imaging system now demand not only efficient storage (low bit rate coding), but also easy manipulation, indexing and retrieval of images. In this paper, we introduce a new method for color image coding based on a visual appearance model of local color image patterns. The visual appearance of small image patterns is characterized by their spatial pattern, color direction and local energy strength. To encode the local visual appearance, an approach based on vector quantization (VQ) is introduced. A separate VQ is designed for the spatial pattern and color direction respectively. It is shown that the method not only achieves good image coding results in terms of rate distortion criterion, it also enables content-based retrieval to be performed in the compressed domain easily and conveniently.

Date Published: 29 December 2000
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 4310, Visual Communications and Image Processing 2001, (29 December 2000); doi: 10.1117/12.411868

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4310:
Visual Communications and Image Processing 2001
Bernd Girod; Charles A. Bouman; Eckehard G. Steinbach, Editor(s)