H.264 ROI coding based on visual perception

An effective H.264 Region-of-Interest (ROI) coding method based on the visual perceptual mechanism of human visual system (HVS) is proposed in this paper. The proposed method consists of two stages. First, by integrating the texture perceptual map and the motion perceptual map, the visual perceptual map is computed, which denotes the visual importance of various regions in the image. Then, a frequency coefficient suppression method is used to achieve the goal of H.264 ROI coding jointly with the visual perceptual map. Experimental results show, compared with the conventional H.264 coding method, the proposed method can improve the visual quality of images and obtain a high PSNR gain up to about 1.2 dB for visual important regions.