Selective coding by focus of attention: A new tool to achieve VLBR video coding

Selective source coding is an essential part of very low bit rate (VLBR) image/video compression where a significant irrelevancy reduction has to be performed. In this paper, this reduction is described in the context of visual attention: the selection of relevant spatial information at the expense of other (non-relevant) information in order to maximize the efficiency of a particular visual communication task. We first give a general framework of selective coding. We then illustrate it with some examples of implementation using the generic wavelet representation as a stand-alone technique or for spatial encoding of the MC residuals in a MC-DPCM hybrid video coding scheme.