Real-time foveation techniques for H.263 video encoding in software

Video coding techniques employ characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) to achieve high coding efficiency. Lee (2000) and Bovik have exploited foveation, which is a non-uniform resolution representation of an image reflecting the sampling in the retina, for low bit-rate video coding. We develop a fast approximation of the foveation model and demonstrate real-time foveation techniques in the spatial domain and discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. We incorporate fast DCT domain foveation into the baseline H.263 video encoding standard. We show that DCT-domain foveation requires much lower computational overhead but generates higher bit rates than spatial domain foveation. Our techniques do not require any modifications of the decoder.