Progressive coding in JPEG2000 - improving content recognition performance using ROIs and importance maps

This paper presents a system, which permits arbitrary regions of importance and corresponding degrees of importance to be assigned in an image within the JPEG2000 image coder. The image can be reconstructed progressively in layers prioritised by importance values rather than the objective criterion of overall PSNR optimisation. Importance progressive coding is very desirable in surveillance applications. The system, IMP-J2K, aims to improve the interpretability or content recognition performance of compressed images, by selecting and distributing the bit allocation to contents of importance in an image and embedding these earlier in the code-stream. IMP-J2K makes use of JPEG2000's data packing sub-system, which can selectively encode data in layers.