Encoding of images containing no-data regions within JPEG2000 framework

The aim of this paper is to enhance the coding performance obtained for images that contain regions without information, here named as no-data regions, within the JPEG2000 framework. In remote sensing and in telemedicine, no-data regions can be produced due to several factors, such as geometric corrections, overlapping of successive layers of information, the interest of the user/application in only certain regions within the image, etc. Most coding systems are not devised to consider such regions separately from the rest of the image, sometimes causing a loss in the coding efficiency. We propose four techniques that address this issue. Experimental results, performed on data from real applications, suggest that the proposed techniques can achieve, in some cases, a PSNR improvement of about 2.5 dB.